I wandered around the castle of Nideck unable to find the exit from which I had commenced my journey.  
So much anxiety and uneasiness were beginning to tell upon my mind; I staggered on, wondering if I was not mad, unable to believe in what I had seen, and yet alarmed at the clearness of my own perceptions.
 
My mind in confusion passed in review that strange man waving his torch overhead in the darkness, howling like a wolf, coldly and going through all the details of an imaginary murder without the of one ghastly detail or circumstance, then escaping and committing to the furious the secret of his crime; these things all my mind, hurried confusedly past my eyes, and made me feel as if I were labouring under a nightmare.
 
Lost in the snow, I ran to and fro panting and alarmed, and unable to judge which way to direct my steps.
 
As day drew near the cold became sharper; I shivered, I Sperver for having brought me from Fribourg to bear a part in this adventure.
 
At last, , my beard a mass of ice, my ears nearly frostbitten, I discovered the gate and rang the bell with all my might.
 
It was then about four in the morning. Knapwurst made me wait a terribly long time. His little , cut in the rock, remained silent; I thought the little humpbacked would never have done ; for of course I supposed he would be in bed and asleep.
 
I rang again.
 
This time his figure appeared , and he cried to me from the door in a fury—
 
"Who are you?"
 
"I?—Doctor Fritz."
 
"Oh, that alters the case," and he went back into his lodge for a lantern, crossed the outer court where the snow came up to his middle, and staring at me through the grating, he exclaimed—
 
"I beg your pardon, Doctor Fritz; I thought you would be asleep up there in Hugh Lupus's tower. Were you ringing? Now that explains why Sperver came to me about midnight to ask if anybody had gone out. I said no, which was quite true, for I never saw you going out."
 
"But pray, Monsieur Knapwurst, do for pity's sake let me in, and I will tell you all about that by-and-by."
 
"Come, come, sir, a little patience."
 
And the hunchback, with the slowest deliberation, the padlock and slipped the bars, whilst my teeth were , and I stood shivering from head to foot.
 
"You are very cold, doctor," said the man, "and you cannot get into the castle. Sperver has fastened the inside door, I don't know why; he does not usually do so; the outer gate is enough. Come in here and get warm. You won't find my little hole very , though. It is nothing but a sty, but when a man is as cold as you are he is not apt to be particular."
 
Without replying to his I followed him in as quickly as I could.
 
We went into the hut, and in spite of my complete state of , I could not help admiring the state of in which I found the place. The roof leaning against the rock, and resting by its other side on a wall not more than six feet high, showed the smoky, blackened rafters from end to end.
 
The whole consisted of but one apartment, furnished with a very uninviting bed, which the did not often take the trouble to make, and two small windows with hexagonal , weather-stained with the rainbow of mother-of-pearl. A large square table filled up the middle, and it would be difficult to account for that massive oak being got in unless by supposing it to have been there before the hut was built.
 
On shelves against the wall were rolls of parchment, and old books great and small. Wide open on the table lay a fine black-letter volume, with illuminations, bound in vellum, clasped and cornered with silver, a collection of old chronicles. Besides there was nothing but two leathern arm-chairs, bearing on them the unmistakable impression of the misshapen figure of this learned gentleman.
 
I need not stay to do more than mention the pens, the jar of tobacco, five or six pipes lying here and there, and in a corner a small cast-iron stove, with its low, open door wide open, and throwing out now and then a volley of bright sparks; and to complete the picture, the cat arching her back, and spitting threateningly at me with her armed paw uplifted.
 
All this scene was with that deep rich light in which the old Flemish painters delighted, and of which they alone the secret, and never left it to the generations after them.
 
"So you went out last night, doctor?" inquired my host, after we had both installed ourselves, and while I had my hands in a warm place upon the stove.
 
"Yes, pretty early," I answered. "I had to look after a patient."
 
This brief explanation seemed to satisfy the little hunchback, and he lighted his blackened boxwood pipe, which was hanging over his chin.
 
"You don't smoke, doctor?"
 
"I beg your pardon, I do."
 
"Well, fill any one of these pipes. I was here," he said, spreading his yellow hand over the open volume. "I was reading the chronicles of Hertzog when you came."
 
"Ah, that accounts for the time I had to wait! Of course you stayed to finish the chapter?" I said, smiling.
 
He owned it, grinning, and we both laughed together.
 
"But if I had known it was you," he said, "I should have finished the chapter another time."
 
There was a short silence, during which I was observing the very physiognomy of this misshapen being—those long deep wrinkles that moated in his wide mouth, his small eyes with the crow's feet at the outer corners, that contorted nose, bulbous at its end, and especially that huge double-storied forehead of his. The whole figure reminded me not a little of the received pictures of Socrates, and while warming myself and listening to the crackling of the fire, I went off into contemplations on the very fortunes of mankind.
 
"Here is this dwarf," I thought, "an ill-shaped, caricature, into a corner of Nideck, and living just like the cricket that beneath the hearthstone. Here is this little Knapwurst, who in the midst of excitement, grand hunts, trains of horsemen coming and going, the barking of the hounds, the of the horses, and the shouts of the hunters, is living quietly all alone, buried in his books, and thinking of nothing but the times long gone by, whilst joy or sorrow, songs or tears, fill the world around him, while spring and summer, autumn and winter, come and look in through his dim windows, by turns brightening, warming, and benumbing the face of nature outside. Whilst men in the outer world are subject to the gentle influences of love, or the sterner impulses of ambition or , hoping, , , and desiring, he neither hopes, nor desires, nor anything. As long as he is smoking his pipe, with his eyes feasting on a musty parchment, he lives in the of dreams, and he goes into over things long, long ago gone by, or which have never existed at all; it is all one to him. 'Hertzog says so and so, somebody else tells the tale a different way,' and he is happy! His leathery face gets more and more deeply wrinkled, his broken angular back bends into sharper angles and corners, his elbows dig beds for themselves in the oak table, his skinny fingers bury themselves in his cheeks, his piggish grey eyes get redder over manuscripts, Latin, Greek, or mediaeval. He falls into raptures, he his lips, he licks his chops like a cat over a dainty dish, and then he throws himself upon that dirty litter, with his knees up to his chin, and he thinks he has had a day! Oh, of God, is a man's duty best done, are his responsibilities best discharged, at the top or at the bottom of the scale of human life?"
 
But the snow was melting away from my legs, the balmy warmth of the stove was shedding a pleasant influence over my feelings, and I felt myself reviving in this mixed atmosphere of tobacco-smoke and burning pine-wood.
 
Knapwurst gravely laid his pipe on the table, and spreading his hand upon the folio, said in a voice that seemed to issue from the bottom of his consciousness; or, if you like it better, from the bottom of a twenty-gallon cask—
 
"Doctor Fritz, here is the law and the prophets!"
 
"How so? what do you mean?"
 
"Parchment—old parchment—that is what I love! These old yellow, , worm-eaten leaves are all that is left to us of the past, from the days of Charlemagne until this day. The oldest families disappear, the old parchments remain. Where would be the glory of the Hohenstauffens, the Leiningens, the Nidecks, and of so many other families of ? Where would be the fame of their titles, their deeds of arms, their magnificent , their expeditions to the Holy Land, their alliances, their claims to remote , their co............