n themselves,--which always seemed to me _very_ conceited. Well, they
knew that we had lots of beautiful castles here in the "lower valley,"
and they assumed, and rightly, that every castle has at least _one_
ghost story connected with it, so they chose this as their hunting
ground, only the game they sought was ghosts, not chamois. Their plan
was to visit every place that was supposed to be haunted, and to meet
every reputed ghost, and prove that it really was no ghost at all.

There was a little inn down in the village then, kept by an old man
named Peter Rosskopf, and the two young men made this their
headquarters. The very first night they began to draw from the old
innkeeper all that he knew of legends and ghost stories connected with
Brixleg and its castles, and as he was a most garrulous old gentleman he
filled them with the wildest delight by his stories of the ghosts of the
castles about the mouth of the Zillerthal. Of course the old man
believed every word he said, and you can imagine his horror and
amazement when, after telling his guests the particularly blood-curdling
story of Kropfsberg and its haunted keep, the elder of the two boys,
whose surname I have forgotten, but whose Christian name was Rupert,
calmly said, "Your story is most satisfactory: we will sleep in
Kropfsberg Keep to-morrow night, and you must provide us with all that
we may need to make ourselves comfortable."

The old man nearly fell into the fire. "What for a blockhead are you?"
he cried, with big eyes. "The keep is haunted by Count Albert's ghost, I
tell you!"

"That is why we are going there to-morrow night; we wish to make the
acquaintance of Count Albert."

"But there was a man stayed there once, and in the morning he was
dead."

"Very silly of him; there are two of us, and we carry revolvers."

"But it's a _ghost_, I tell you," almost screamed the innkeeper; "are
ghosts afraid of firearms?"

"Whether they are or not, we are _not_ afraid of _them_."

Here the younger boy broke in,--he was named Otto von Kleist. I remember
the name, for I had a music teacher once by that name. He abused the
poor old man shamefully; told him that they were going to spend the
night in Kropfsberg in spite of Count Albert and Peter Rosskopf, and
that he might as well make the most of it and earn his money with
cheerfulness.

In a word, they finally bullied the old fellow into submission, and when
the morning came he set about preparing for the