in a state of convalescence, I
expressed a desire to return to Fribourg, but he entreated me so
earnestly to stay altogether at Nideck, and offered me terms so
honourable and advantageous, that I felt myself unable to refuse
compliance with his wishes.

I shall long remember the first boar-hunt in which I had the honour to
join with the count, and especially the magnificent return home in a
torchlight procession after having sat in the saddle for twelve hours
together.

I had just had supper, and was going up into Hugh Lupus's tower
completely knocked up, when, passing Sperver's room, whose door was half
open, shouts and cries of joy reached my ears. I stopped, when the most
jovial spectacle burst upon me. Around the massive oaken table beamed
twenty square rosy faces, bright and ruddy with health and fun.

The hob and nobbing of the glasses gave out an incessant tinkling and
clattering. There was sitting Sperver with his bossy forehead, his
moustaches bedewed with Rhenish wine, his eyes sparkling, and his grey
hair rather disordered; at his right was Marie Lagoutte, on his left
Knapwurst. He was raising aloft the ancient silver-gilt and chased goblet
dimmed with age, and on his manly chest glittered the silver plate of
his shoulder-belt, for, according to his custom on a hunting day, he was
still wearing the uniform of his office.

The colour of Marie Lagoutte's cheeks, rather redder even than usual,
told of an evening of jollity, and her broad cap-frills seemed as if they
were wanting to fly all abroad; she sat laughing, now with one, then with
another.

Knapwurst, squatting in his arm-chair, with his head on a level with
Sperver's elbow, looked like a big pumpkin. Then came Tobias Offenloch,
so red that you would have thought he had bathed his face in the red
wine, leaning back with his wig upon the chair-back and his wooden leg
extended under the table. Farther on loomed the melancholy long face of
Sebalt, who was peeping with a sickly smile into the bottom of his
wine-glass.

Besides these worthies there were present the waiting-people, men and
women servants, comprising all that little community which springs up
around the board of the great people of the land and belongs to them as
the ivy, and the moss, and the wild convolvulus belong to the monarch of
the forests.

Upon the groaning board lay a vast ham, displaying its concentric circles
of pink and white. Then among the gaily-patterned plates and dish