ineer expends the largest portion of his
art in fortifying the weakest point of the citadel, taking care that there
shall be a constant flight of shot, great and small, across the most
accessible of its approaches. By one of the exclusive ordinances of those
times, in which men were glad to get relief from the violence and rapacity
of the baron and the satellite of the prince, ordinances that it was the
fashion of the day to term liberty, the family of Hofmeister had come into
the exercise of a certain charge, or monopoly, that, in truth, had always
constituted its wealth and importance, but of which it was accustomed to
speak as forming its principal claim to the gratitude of the public, for
duties that had been performed not only so well, but for so long a period,
by an unbroken succession of patriots descended from the same stock. They
who judged of the value attached to the possession of this charge, by the
animation with which all attempts to relieve them of the burthen were
repelled, must have been in error; for, to hear their friends descant on
the difficulties of the duties, of the utter impossibility that they
should be properly discharged by any family that had not been in their
exercise just one hundred and seventy-two years and a half, the precise
period of the hard servitude of the Hofmeisters, and the rare merit of
their self-devotion to the common good, it would seem that they were so
many modern Curtii, anxious to leap into the chasm of uncertain and
endless toil, to save the Republic from the ignorance and peculations of
certain interested and selfish knaves, who wished to enjoy the same high
trusts, for a motive so unworthy as that of their own particular
advantage. This subject apart, however, and with a strong reservation in
favor of the supremacy of Berne, on whom his importance depended, a better
or a more philanthropic man than Peter Hofmeister would not have been
easily found. He was a hearty laugher, a hard drinker, a common and
peculiar failing of the age, a great respecter of the law, as was meet in
one so situated, and a bachelor of sixty-eight, a time of life that, by
referring his education to a period more remote by half a century, than
that in which the incidents of our legend took place, was not at all in
favor of any very romantic predilection in behalf of the rest of the human
race. In short, the Herr Hofmeister was a bailiff, much as Balthazar was a
headsman, on account of some particula