imes have already improved, since the Hapsburg, as a just man----"

"Things have not been so bad here for a long while, the saints be
praised!" his companion broke in. "Siebenburg, or some of his wife's
rich kindred, will at last be compelled to settle matters. We have
the law and the Honourable Council to attend to that. Look up! Yonder
stately old house gave its daughter to the penniless knight. She is one
of our customers too; a handsome woman, and not one of the worst either.
But her mother, who was born a countess--if the shoe doesn't make a foot
small which Nature created big, there's such an outcry! True, the old
woman, her mother, is worse still; she scolds and screams. But look up
at the bow window. There she stands. I'm only a poor brewer's son, but
before I----"

"You don't say so!" the other interrupted. "Have you seen the owl in the
cage in front of the guardhouse at the gate of the hospital? It is her
living image; and how her chin projects and moves up and down, as though
she were chewing leather!"

"And yet," said the other, as if insisting upon something difficult to
believe, "and yet the old woman is a real countess."

The Weissenburg apprentice expressed his astonishment with another: "You
don't say so!" but as he spoke he grasped his companion's arm, adding
earnestly: "Let us go. That ugly old woman just looked at me, and if it
wasn't the evil eye I shall go straight to the church and drive away the
misfortune with holy water."

"Come, then," answered the Nuremberg youth, but continued thoughtfully:
"Yet my master's grandmother, a woman of eighty, is probably older than
the one up there, but nobody could imagine a kinder, pleasanter dame.
When she looks approvingly at one it seems as if the dear God's blessing
were shining from two little windows."

"That's just like my grandmother at home!" exclaimed the Weissenburg
apprentice with sparkling eyes.

Turning from the Eysvogel mansion as they spoke, they pursued their way.

Siebenburg had overtaken the apprentices, but ere crossing the threshold
of the house which was now his home he stopped before it.

It might, perhaps, be called the largest and handsomest in Nuremberg;
but it was only a wide two-story structure, though the roof had been
adorned with battlements and the sides with a small bow-windowed turret.
At the second story a bracket, bearing an image of the Madonna, had been
built out on one side, and on the other the bow window from w