In one corner of the sack he stuck that valuable counselor in all the ills of life, the book "Georgica Curiosa," which was an inventory of all the healing herbs with which the sack was filled. Nay, his love for his daughter made the worthy man part with even his most precious talisman—the plague amulet. This was a little blue silk cushion filled with the leaves of herbs beneficial against the plague, and inscribed with the following charm in letters of gold: "Longe, tarde cede, recede, redi!" which is really a very good charm, for it means that one should hasten away as far and as soon as possible from the place where the plague prevails, and not return for a long time after it is all over. This amulet the learned man had worn, fastened by a silken cord round his neck, night and day for years. Now, however, he said good-by to it, and the tears came into his eyes as he tied it round his daughter's white neck, and whispered tenderly:

"Never take it off, my dear, never take it off! It was your mother's."

Then the great scholar, after carefully observing the aspects of the seven planets, was very particular to calculate beforehand a day which, owing to a propitious conjunction, would be a very favorable day for traveling, for warfare, for the donning of new clothes, for courtships, and for making visits and purchases.

He took leave of his son-in-law and his daughter on the previous evening, for the caravan was to depart before sunrise, while Orion was in the ascendant, at which time the learned man would already have surrendered his limbs to repose. Now, all the world knows that whoever is involuntarily aroused from his slumbers at such a time will wake up every day at the self-same hour for a whole year afterward and not be able to go to sleep again: such a contingency therefore was to be guarded against at any cost.

Pretty Michal wept long and sore when the time came to say good-by. She wept for her good, affectionate father, for her flowers, her serving-maids, her little room which looked out upon the garden, her kitchen, bright with burnished copper vessels; but the ungrateful little thing did not weep very much for the learned books she left behind her, though, indeed, she could never cease to think of those with whom she had had her daily conversation for years. Nay, she so managed as to leave behind her the whole sack-load of medicinal herbs collected with such wisdom, "Georgica Curiosa" to boot. Instead of that she took with her one of her fan-tailed pigeons, which she dexterously smuggled into her long pocket.

The amulet fastened round her neck she held in high honor, not because it was a febrifuge, but because it was the solitary memento of her mother which she possessed.

Her husband, also, was motherless. He, too, had never known a mother's love.

Perhaps, too, she shed a few tears as she threw behind the fire a certain carefully folded up bundle of papers. They were the billets-doux which had reached her through the aërial post. She held them tightly in her hand till the mules jangling their bells stood before the door. Longer than that she could not hold them. She fancied she had destroyed them when she had burnt them, but, alas! the burning of those letters was only so much labor lost.

But joy always follows after sorrow.

Michal was going on a journey for the first time in her life. For the first time in her life she was to see field and forest beneath the open sky. Set in a frame of the most beautiful landscape, even her husband looked better than he had ever looked before. Never had she thought him so agreeable, and he cut quite a stately figure on horseback; indeed, she scarcely recognized him as the same being who used to trip so humbly after the professor with his books under his arm, for he could sing cheerily among the students who walked along by his side, and his merry laugh was heard from one end of the caravan to the other.

The city walls of Keszmár and the well-known mountains had long ago been left far behind, and Michal kept thinking to herself that she was now her own mistress, and that she had a master who was at the same time her slave. The house that she would henceforth call her home would have a very different appearance from the one she had just left. There would be no one to supervise or keep her in order; she would have no other monitor but her own conjugal virtue. She would be a model of a wife, upon whom all eyes should be fixed, and of whom people would say: "Try and be like that God-fearing lady, learn from her sobriety, decency, piety, frugality, and domestic economy; learn from her how to speak sensibly in four languages, and still more sensibly to keep silence." Thus she tried to discern, through the enigmatical gloom of the future, the joys and delights that her soul longed for, so as the better to accommodate herself to her new position.

She was the only woman in the whole company.

A driver had been assigned to her, who was to lead her mule by the bridle whenever the path went through a brook or over a stone, and stimulate it whenever it had to clamber up the steep mountain-side. He was an enigmatical Slovack lad, with bast shoes and a hat with a brim drawn deep down over his eyes. "Gee!" and "Whoa!" were the only sounds he ever uttered, and these were naturally addressed to the mule.

The character of the region had suddenly and completely changed. Mountains, pine forests, and roaring waterfalls succeeded one another in rapid succession.

The numerous company sat them down on the fresh grass at the foot of a shady tree by the side of a purling brook, and everyone produced his knapsack, his wallet, or his flask. The wealthier of them shared their good fare with the students, who expressed their thankfulness by singing merry songs. There was one student who particularly distinguished himself by his facetiousness, and whom everyone called Simplex. He, too, introduces himself under that very name in his contemporary memoirs, from which we have borrowed many of the data of this our veracious history. He was an itinerant student, drummer, and trumpeter, and a wag and good fellow to boot. He soon succeeded in gaining Henry's goodwill, and he also favored the young bride with his company from time to time, taking the whip out of the hands of the sleepy driver and rating him soundly in Polish, which the other endured without a murmur.

The jests of Simplex put the company in high good-humor. Even Michal caught the contagion of the general merriment. The spicy, fresh air seemed to relieve her mind of sorrow.

Suddenly, on reaching the summit of a lofty mountain, another panorama unfolded itself before their eyes. The steep mountain wall was succeeded by a deep glen, and the tops of the huge pine trees massed together below seemed to the naked eye to be a meadow of a wonderful green perpetually in motion. In the distance arose lofty rocks, piled one above the other and split up by chasms full of ice and snow. The path wound steeply down into this glen, where it was already night, and by the side of the path ran a mountain stream, which, pouring forth from the crevices of the granite rocks, plunged downward in a hundred glistening columns like a crystal organ.

But it was not this splendid sight, but another, very strange and very terrible, on the other side of the way, which riveted pretty Michal's attention.

In the crevice of a projecting rock a lofty stake had been firmly planted; on the top of the stake was a wheel, and on the wheel lay something distantly resembling the shape of a man. The hands and feet hung loosely down; the neck and skull were thrown backward and reclined half over the tire of the wheel. Large black birds swept slowly round and round, and though startled by the