flow; but the elder woman rushed at me, beside her wits
with rage, to snatch it from me; and whereas she was doubtless its
mother or grand-dame, I might have yielded up the child, but that Ritter
Franz came to me in haste to bid me, from my Aunt Jacoba, carry it to
her.

Who better than she knew the whole art and secret of healing the wounds
of a hound's making? And so I told the old dame, to comfort her, albeit
she struggled furiously to get the babe from me. Nay and she might have
done so if the little thing had not clung round my neck with its right
arm that had no hurt, as lovingly as though it had been mine own and no
kin to the shrieking old woman.

But ere long a clear and strange light was cast on the matter; for when
we had loosened the child's little shirt, and my aunt had duly washed
the blood from the wounds, under the dark hue of its skin behold it was
tender white, and so it was plain that here was a stolen child, needing
to be rescued.

Then the house-stewardess, the widow of a forester whose husband had
been slain by poachers, and who labored bravely to bring up her five
orphan children, with my aunt's help--this woman, I say, now remembered
that when she had made her pilgrimage, but lately, to Vierzehnheiligen,
the Knight von Hirschhorn, treasurer to the Lord Bishop of Bamberg
at Schesslitz, not far from the place of pilgrimage, had lost a babe,
stolen away by vagabond knaves. Then Aunt Jacoba bethought herself that
restitution and benevolence might be made one; and, quoth she, this
matter might greatly profit the housekeeper and her little ones,
inasmuch as that the sorrowing father had promised a ransom of thirty
Hungarian ducats to him who should bring back his little daughter
living; and forthwith the whole tribe of the bear-leaders were to be
bound. The old beldame gave our men a hard job, for she tried to make
off to the forest, and called aloud: "Hind--Hind!" which was the young
wench's name, with outlandish words which doubtless were to warn her to
flee; but the serving men gained their end and made the wild hag fast.

Ann was pale and in pain with her head aching, but she helped my aunt
to tend the child; and I was glad, inasmuch as I conceived that I knew
where to find Herdegen and the young dancing wench, and I cared only to
save his poor betrayed sweetheart from shame and sorrow. I crept away,
unmarked, through the garden of herbs behind the lodge, to a moss but
which my banished cousin