ound broke the silence as the young man entered the churchyard.
Seating himself upon a flat tombstone, he proceeded to arrange his
canvas and sketching materials; but as he was busied thus his foot
struck something hard. Bending down to remove the obstacle, which he
took for a large stone, he found, to his horror, that it was a human
skull. With an ejaculation he cast the horrid relic away from him,
and to divert his mind from the grisly incident commenced to work
feverishly. Speedily his buoyant mind cast off the gloomy train of
thought awakened by the dreadful find, and for nearly a couple of hours
he sat sketching steadily, until he was suddenly startled to hear the
clock in the tower above him strike the hour of midnight.

He was gathering his things preparatory to departure, when a strange
rustling sound attracted his attention. Raising his eyes from his
task, he beheld a sight which made his flesh creep. The exposed and
half-buried bones of the dead warriors which littered the surface of the
churchyard drew together and formed skeletons. These reared themselves
from the graves and stood upright, and as they did so formed grisly
and dreadful battalions--Swedes formed with Swedes and Spaniards with
Spaniards. On a sudden hoarse words of command rang out on the midnight
air, and the two companies attacked one another.

The luckless beholder of the dreadful scene felt the warm blood grow
chill within his veins. Hotter and hotter became the fray, and many
skeletons sank to the ground as though slain in battle. One of them, he
whose skull the artist had kicked, sank down at the young man's feet. In
a hollow voice he commanded the youth to tell to the world how they were
forced to combat each other because they had been enemies in life, and
that they could obtain no rest until they had been buried.

Directly the clock struck one the battle ceased, and the bones once more
lay about in disorder. The artist (who, it need hardly be said, gave no
more thought to his picture) hastened back to the inn and in faltering
accents related his experiences. When the Seven Years' War broke out,
not long afterward, the people of Oppenheim declared that the apparition
of the skeletons had foretold the event.

The Robbers of the Rhine

For many hundreds of years the valley of the Rhine itself, and the
various valleys adjacent, were the haunt of numerous bodies of rapacious
and desperate banditti. The rugged, mountainous nature of the