s at her house, Master Gerard
talking to her in the doorway, earnestly and apart. Both of them had a
look of much solemnity, as though the matter of their discourse were some
very weighty one.

Presently her father kissed her and she came down the steps. I leaped
from my horse to help her to the saddle, but the respectable serving-man
was before me. So that instead I went about and looked to the buckles and
girths, which were all in order, and patted the arching neck of the
beautiful milk-white palfrey whereon she rode. Then Master Gerard waved a
hand and went within.

And as we fared forth out of the Weiss Thor into the keener air of the
country, I thought what a charge I had--to squire two ladies so
surpassingly fair, each in her own several graces, as our Helene and the
Lady Ysolinde.

No sooner, however, were we past the outer barriers, at which the
soldiers of the Duke Casimir kept guard, than a vast, ungainly wight
started up from the road-side.

"Jan Lubber Fiend!" cried the Lady Ysolinde; "what do you here?"

The oaf grinned his awful, writhed smile and wriggled his great body
after the manner of a puppy desirous of the milk-platter.

"Think you, my lady," said he, cunningly, "that your poor Jan would abide
within the precincts of the city house with that funeral ape bidding me
do this and do that, sit here and sit there, come in and go out at his
pleasure? A thing of dough that I could twist into knots as easily as I
can crack my joints."

And of this latter accomplishment he proceeded to give us certain
examples which sounded like cannon-shots delivered at close quarters.

"Get home with you!" cried Ysolinde; "I cannot have thee following
us. There are two men presently to meet us, to guard us to
Plassenburg, and we do not need you, Jan Lubber Fiend. Get back and
take care of my father."

"Oh, as for him," said the monster, sitting down squat upon the plain
road in the dust, "he is a tough old cock, and will come to no harm. We
can e'en leave him with a good cook, a prime cellar, and an easy mind.
But this young man is not to trust to with so many pretty maids. Jan will
come and look after him."

And with that he nodded his hay-stack of a head three times at me, and
going to the hedge-root he laid hold of the top of a young poplar and
turned him about, keeping the stem of it over his shoulder. Then he set
himself to pull like a horse that starts a load, and presently, without
apparently distressin