guishable. My
great-uncle, the archbishop, in full canonicals, celebrated mass
before the requiem altar; my grandfather, the chancellor, had large
parchment documents before him, upon which he affixed the state seal.
My great-uncle, the field-marshal, in armor, and with the marshal's
baton in his hand, gave orders. My ancestress Katherine, who was a
lady of the court, and of remarkable beauty, rolled her eyes about,
and in her whole face no feature moved but those glittering eyes; and
my aunt Clementina, the abbess of the Ursuline Convent, sang psalms
with my uncle, in which the others from time to time joined."

"But the laughter, the tumult, the comic songs?" asked the pastor.

"I am coming to that. At the other end of the table sat some of my
more distant relatives--my young cousin Clarissa, who danced herself
to death; and a cousin, who was a celebrated flute player; and my
great-uncle Otto, who was devoted to hazard, and now rattled dice into
a copper goblet, and cursed his bad-luck when he made a bad throw;
also another cousin, who died on the very night of her marriage, and
still wore a faded wedding wreath; finally, my uncle Ladislaus, who
was banished from the family circle early in the century, and whose
frame hangs in the picture-gallery empty, his portrait being removed."

"How did you know him, then?" By this question the pastor hoped to
check the flow of the countess's visions.

Theudelinde, however, answered that her uncle Ladislaus, being a rebel
and a heretic, had not alone been declared a traitor, but had incurred
the ban of excommunication. He was taken prisoner and beheaded. "And
therefore," she added, with an air of conviction, "it was easy to
recognize him by his death's-head. Likewise, during his lifetime he
ignored the king's express command, and was the first to introduce
tobacco-smoke into the country, and on this account, at his execution,
he received the punishment awarded to the smoker, of having a
pipe-handle run through his nose. Last night, as he sat at the table,
he held between the teeth of his monstrous death's-head a large
meerschaum pipe, and the whole vault smelled in the most fearful
manner of tobacco-smoke."

This remark convinced the priest that the countess had been dreaming.

"Between both my cousins," she went on, "the nun and the bride, there
was an empty chair. There I felt obliged to seat myself. The bride
wished to hear of the fashions; she praised the stuff of my Gr