she gave a marvellous
loud ejaculation of delight, and it appeared as though all the deep
wrinkles of her face smoothed themselves out in an instant. Her pale
lips and cheeks grew red, and the youth and beauty to which she had
long said "good-bye" came back to her again. She cried out, "Ah, ah,
Herr Junker! Is this you that I see here really and truly? Is this you,
yourself? Oh, I welcome you! I am so delighted to see you!" and she was
nearly falling down at his feet.

But he answered this demonstration in words of anger, whilst his eyes
flashed fire. Nobody could understand what it was that he said to her.
But the old woman shrunk into a corner, as pale and wrinkled as she had
been at first, and whimpering faintly and unintelligibly.

"My dear Mr. Luetkens," the stranger said to the master of the house, "I
hope you will take great care lest something annoying may happen in
your house here. I really hope, with all my heart, that everything will
go well on this auspicious occasion. But this old creature, Barbara
Roloffin, is by no means so well up to her business as perhaps you
suppose. She is an old acquaintance of mine, and I am sorry to say that
she has on many occasions not paid proper attention to her patients."

Both Luetkens and his wife had been very anxious, and had felt most eery
and uncanny about this whole business, and full of suspicion as to old
Barbara Roloffin, particularly when they remembered the extraordinary
transfiguration which took place in her when she saw the stranger. They
had very great suspicions that she was in the practice of black and
unholy arts, so that they forbade her to cross the threshold of their
house any more, and they made arrangements with another _accoucheuse_.

On this, old Barbara was very angry, and said that Luetkens and his wife
would pay very dearly for what they had done to her.

Luetkens's hope and gladness were turned into bitter heart-sorrow and
deep grief, when his wife brought into the world a horrible changeling
in place of the beautiful boy predicted by Barbara Roloffin. It was a
creature all chestnut brown, with two horns on its head, great fat
eyes, no nose whatever, a big wide mouth with a white tongue sticking
out of it upside down, and no neck. Its head was down between its
shoulders; its body was wrinkled and swollen; its arms came out just
above its hips, and it had long, thin shanks.

Mr. Luetkens wept and lamented terribly. "Oh, just heavens!" he c