g wry-faced from an
abhorred potion.

'We have warned you, Fraulein Groschen!' he exclaimed. 'It now becomes
our duty to see that you are not snared.'

Margarita reddened, and returned: 'You are kind. But I am a Christian
maiden and not a Pagan soldan, and I do not require a body of tawny
guards at my heels.'

Thereat she flung back to her companions, and began staining her pretty
mouth with grapes anew.

THE TAPESTRY WORD

Fair maids will have their hero in history. Siegfried was Margarita's
chosen. She sang of Siegfried all over the house. 'O the old days of
Germany, when such a hero walked!' she sang.

'And who wins Margarita,' mused Farina, 'happier than Siegfried, has in
his arms Brunhild and Chrimhild together!'

Crowning the young girl's breast was a cameo, and the skill of some
cunning artist out of Welschland had wrought on it the story of the
Drachenfels. Her bosom heaved the battle up and down.

This cameo was a north star to German manhood, but caused many chaste
expressions of abhorrence from Aunt Lisbeth, Gottlieb's unmarried
sister, who seemed instinctively to take part with the Dragon. She was a
frail-fashioned little lady, with a face betokening the perpetual smack
of lemon, and who reigned in her brother's household when the good wife
was gone. Margarita's robustness was beginning to alarm and shock Aunt
Lisbeth's sealed stock of virtue.

'She must be watched, such a madl as that,' said Aunt Lisbeth. 'Ursula!
what limbs she has!'

Margarita was watched; but the spy being neither foe nor friend, nothing
was discovered against her. This did not satisfy Aunt Lisbeth, whose own
suspicion was her best witness. She allowed that Margarita dissembled
well.

'But,' said she to her niece, 'though it is good in a girl not to
flaunt these naughtinesses in effrontery, I care for you too much not to
say--Be what you seem, my little one!'

'And that am I!' exclaimed Margarita, starting up and towering.

'Right good, my niece,' Lisbeth squealed; 'but now Frau Groschen lies in
God's acre, you owe your duty to me, mind! Did you confess last week?'

'From beginning to end,' replied Margarita.

Aunt Lisbeth fixed pious reproach on Margarita's cameo.

'And still you wear that thing?'

'Why not?' said Margarita.

'Girl! who would bid you set it in such a place save Satan? Oh, thou
poor lost child! that the eyes of the idle youths may be drawn there!
and thou become his snare to others, Margarit