While she and Agnes played with their dolls (“tocken”), or kept house with their toy cooking-vessels, Heinrich and Conrad jousted rather noisily on hobby horses, or, failing these, on two mettlesome steeds, which, outside the nursery, would have been taken for sticks. Nurse (“amme”) was as important a personage then as now, and had as many rôles to fill. Sometimes she presided over tourneys where wooden swords wrought frightful havoc on wooden shields. If anybody came out of the combat with bruised knee or finger, it was hers to dress the warrior’s wound—and, maybe, make it well again with kisses. At the tourneys where she presided there were nothing but victors. Everybody won the prize of painted egg or apple. (By the way, did you ever notice that the Christ Child of mediæval artists has always an apple in His chubby hand?) Sometimes she went visiting the stately “halls” where Elizabeth and Agnes played Châtelaine, and ate the wonderful things they cooked for her, and inquired about their doll-children, just as nurse does to-day. In a carved wooden box she kept the “best” toys, the birds and animals in coloured clay, or wood, or metal, which were too fine to be played with every day. In the nursery door there was always a hole cut near the ground, just large enough for a tiny dog or a cat to creep through. That, I am sure, was a kind thought of nurse’s. When games got too noisy, and little boys and girls were tiring themselves into crossness, she had a way of gathering them into the shelter of the great fire-place, and telling them the most fascinating stories. Some of the tales that are prime nursery-favourites to-day were told, without a doubt, by her “Amme” to Saint Elizabeth when she was a little girl. “The Seven Wild Swans,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Clever Else,” “The Fox and the Geese,” and many, many others. Some of the “Lügenmärchen” (of the kind definitely associated in later years with the name of the immortal Munchhausen) go back equally far. Nobody knows, for instance, how old is the legend of “Schlaraffenland”—“the Land of Cockayne”—of which our Middle Irish “Vision of Mac Conglinghe” is an interesting variant. Young wits were sharpened by guessing riddles. Here are some Thirteenth Century ones, which Saint Elizabeth may have tried to guess:— “The Full of the Valley, the Full of the Land, But never the Full of a little girl’s Hand.” The answer to that must often have lain before her, making her feel, as she stood in her high window-niche in the Kinderstube of the Wartburg, as if she were looking out from a tall ship on a great sea, beneath which towns, and fields, and woods lay buried, and unseen. For it was the Mist—above which the Wartburg, on its high crag, stood upraised. Here is another which helped little boys and girls (who would presently be studying their “Comput”) to remember the divisions of time.