gh his neck. One of the fishermen had
(late on the previous evening) met Juergen going towards Martin's
house; and this was not the first time Juergen had raised his knife
against Martin--so they knew that he was the murderer. The town in
which the prison was built was a long way off, and the wind was
contrary for going there; but not half an hour would be required to
get across the bay, and a quarter of an hour would bring them from
thence to Noerre Vosborg, a great castle with walls and ditches. One of
Juergen's captors was a fisherman, a brother of the keeper of the
castle; and he declared it might be managed that Juergen should for the
present be put into the dungeon at Vosborg, where Long Martha the
gipsy had been shut up till her execution.

No attention was paid to the defence made by Juergen; the few drops of
blood upon his shirt-sleeve bore heavy witness against him. But Juergen
was conscious of innocence; and as there was no chance of immediately
righting himself, he submitted to his fate.

The party landed just at the spot where Sir Bugge's castle had stood
and where Juergen had walked with his foster-parents after the burial
feast, during the four happiest days of his childhood. He was led by
the old path over the meadow to Vosborg; and again the elder
blossomed and the lofty lindens smelt sweet, and it seemed but
yesterday that he had left the spot.

In the two wings of the castle a staircase leads down to a spot below
the entrance, and from thence there is access to a low vaulted cellar.
Here Long Martha had been imprisoned, and hence she had been led away
to the scaffold. She had eaten the hearts of five children, and had
been under the delusion that if she could obtain two more, she would
be able to fly and to make herself invisible. In the midst of the
cellar roof was a little narrow air-hole, but no window. The blooming
lindens could not waft a breath of comforting fragrance into that
abode, where all was dark and mouldy. Only a rough bench stood in the
prison; but "a good conscience is a soft pillow," and consequently
Juergen could sleep well.

The thick oaken door was locked, and secured on the outside by an iron
bar; but the goblin of superstition can creep through a keyhole into
the baron's castle just as into the fisherman's hut; and wherefore
should he not creep in here, where Juergen sat thinking of Long Martha
and her evil deeds? Her last thought on the night before her execution
had fille