cauldron of brass. The walls seemed to have been stripped of their former adornments. I knew, I felt, that I was in the place where the former master of the house, blinded and befooled by his lust for sensuous enjoyment, had descended to diabolical practices. When I dropped a word or two hinting at this subject, the old man raised his eyes to heaven with an expression of the bitterest melancholy, and said, with a deep sigh, 'Ah! Holy Virgin! hast thou forgiven him?' He then silently pointed to a large marble slab embedded in the middle of the flooring. I looked at this slab with much closeness of observation, and became aware that there were reddish veins meandering about through the stone. And, as I fixed my attention upon them more and more closely, heaven aid me! the features of a human face grew more and more distinctly traceable and visible, just as when, on looking at a distorted picture through a lens specially constructed, all its lines and effects then, and not till then, grow clear and sharp.

"It was the face of a child that was looking at me out of that stone, marked with the heartrending anguish of the agony of death. I could see drops of blood welling from the breast; but the rest of the form of the body seemed to flow vaguely into indistinctness, as if a stream of water were carrying it away. It was with a hard struggle that I overcame the horror which well-nigh overmastered me. I could not bring myself to utter a word. We left that terrible, mysterious place in silence. Not till I had walked about in the park and the lawns for some time could I overcome the inexplicable feeling which had so annulled my enjoyment of that little earthly paradise. From many things which I gathered from the detached utterances of the old man, I was led to conclude that the crazy being who had thrust herself into such intimate relations with the last proprietor of the place (in other respects a large-hearted and cultivated man) had worked upon him by promising him, through the exercise of her accursed arts, the fulfilment of his dearest wishes--unfailing and everlasting happiness in love--and so led him on to unutterable crime."

"This is an affair for Cyprian," Ottmar said. "He would be as delighted over the bleeding baby in the marble, and in the old Castellan, as we." "Well," Theodore went on to say, "although all this affair may be traceable to foolish fancies--although it may be nothing but a fable kept up by the people--still, if that strangely-veined slab of marble is capable, even under the influence of a lively imagination, of showing the lineaments of a bleeding baby when looked at closely and carefully, something uncanny must have happened, or the faithful old servant could not have felt his master's guilt so deeply in his heart, nor would that strange stone give such a terrible evidence of it."

Ottmar said, replying, "We will take an early opportunity of laying this matter before Saint Serapion, that we may ascertain exactly how it stands; but for the time, I think we ought to let witches alone, and go back to our subject of the 'German Devil,' as to which I would fain say a word or two. What I am driving at is--that the characteristic German manner of treating this subject is seen in its truest colour when it is a question of the Devil's manner of conducting himself in ordinary everyday life. Whenever he takes part in that, he is thoroughly 'up' in every description of evil and mischief--in everything that is terrible and alarming. He is always on the alert to set traps for the good, so as to lead as many of them as possible over to his own kingdom; but yet he is a thoroughly fair and honourably-dealing personage, abiding by his compacts and contracts in the most accurate and punctilious manner. From this it results that he is often outwitted, so that he appears in the character of a 'stupid' Devil (and this is not improbably the origin of the common expression 'stupid devil'); but, besides all this, the character of the German Satan has a strong tincture of the burlesque mixed up with the more predominant quality of mind-disturbing terror--that horror which oppresses the mind and disorganizes it. Now, the art of portraying the Devil in this distinctively German fashion seems to be very much lost. For this aforesaid amalgamation of his characteristics does not seem to occur in any of the more recent attempts at representing him. He is either shown as a mere buffoon, or as a being so terrible that the mind is revolted by him."

"I think," said Lothair, "you are forgetting one recent story in which this said mingling of the brightly Intellectual (verging sometimes on the comic) with the Terrific is very finely managed, and in which the full effectiveness of the old-world sort of devil-spook-story is carried out in a masterly manner. I mean Fouqué's splendid tale, the 'Galgenmännlein.'[1] The terribly vivacious little creature in the phial--who comes out of it at night, and lays himself down on the breast of that master of his, who has such awful dreams--the fearsome man in the mountain glen, with his great coal-black steed which crawls up the perpendicular cliffs like a fly on a wall--in short, all the uncanny and supernatural elements which are present in the story in such plentiful measure--together rivet and strain the attention to an extent absolutely frightening; it affects one like some powerful drink, which immensely excites the senses and at the same time sheds a beneficent warmth through the heart. It is owing to the tone which pervades it all through, and to the vividness of the separate pictures, that, although at the end one is thoroughly delighted that the poor wretch does get out of the Devil's clutches, still, the element of the Intellectuality of the evil beings, and the scenes which touch upon the realm of comedy (such as the part about the 'Half Heller') stand out with the principal high-lights upon them. I scarcely can think of any tale of diablerie which has produced such an impression upon me."

[Footnote 1: Known in English as "The Bottle Imp."]

"There can't be much doubt," said Theodore, "that Fouqué got the materials for that story out of some old chronicle."

"Even if he did," Lothair said, "I should hope you wouldn't detract from the author's merit on that score, like the more common class of critics, whose peculiar system obliges them always to try and find out the fundamental materials from which a writer has 'taken' his work. They make immense capital out of pointing out said source, and look down with great contempt on the wretched author who merely kneads his characters together out of a pre-existent dough. As if it mattered that the author absorbed into himself germs from without him! The shaping of the material is the important part of the business. We ought to think of our Patron Saint Serapion. His stories were told out of his soul as he had seen them with his eyes, not as he had read about them."

"You do me much injustice, Lothair," said Theodore, "if you suppose I am of any other opinion. And there is nobody who has shown more admirably how a subject may be vividly represented than Heinrich Kleist in his tale of Kohlhaas, the horse dealer."

"However," said Lothair, "as we have been talking of Hafftitz's book, I should like to read to you a story of which I took most of the leading ideas from the Michrochronicon. I wrote it during an attack of a very queer mood of mind, which beset me for a very considerable time. And I hope, Ottmar, my dear friend, it will lead you to admit that the 'spleen,' which Theodore says I am suffering from, is not so very serious as he would make it out to be."

He took out a manuscript, and read:

ALBERTINE'S