n the reason is
asked, they say: 'when his head came out of the chimney the country
folks would think it was fire, and would ring the bells, assemble
from every direction, and cause all the riot and trouble incident
to a conflagration.'

It is worth noting in this connection, that the prejudice against red
hair is rapidly being forgotten among cultivated persons, and is far
from being what it was within the memory of man. The vulgar, who are the
last to abandon an absurdity, still retain a few jokes on the subject;
but these will probably be as unintelligible in time, as would be the
jests of the middle ages on the _rufa tunica_, or red frock. The
boorishness and cruelty of 'the good old times,' are strongly reflected
in the following, which a scholar of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries was not ashamed to record of himself:

'When lately during Lent, in the year 1506, we had several guests,
among them a rustic from Weilsberg, who wore a long red beard. I
asked him why he did so? and he replied, 'out of grief for the
death of his father-in-law.' To which I replied: 'All wrong, for
red is a color suited to rejoicing'--at which remark all the guests
present began to laugh immoderately. But he with his rustic
simplicity, being made ashamed, answered: 'Yes, sir--that is very
true, and yet I assure you that I feel as sorrowful in this red
beard as any other man does in his black one.'

The man who does not--though three and a half centuries lie
between--sympathize with the sad, honest simplicity of the poor
red-bearded mourner, must be as gross and heartless as was the narrator
of the incident. It gives one, indeed, strange subject for reflection,
to pause among these old trifles of a by-gone day; jotted down for
passing time in a rude age, and yet preserved so clearly, cut and
freshly colored in the modern time! Conrad Buehel, the free lance, and
his enemy--the red-bearded mourner, the Baron von Stoeffel and his
praetor, with the simple minded thief, and timid priests, and the genial
but coarse scholar, Bebelius himself, were all real men in their day,
who might have passed away without the slightest link to bind their
names or natures to an after age--and now they live in a jest! Still
they live--and it may be that when the page which you now peruse, O
reader, shall be as old as the yellow leaves of the sixteenth century
volume now before me, some one