XVII. HOW THEY HUNTED THE STAG 172 XVIII. HOW HERR VON ZIMMERN CAME AGAIN 181 XIX. HOW ERNA AND ALBRECHT TALKED OF LIFE 191 XX. HOW THEY RODE TO FLY THE FALCON 198 XXI. HOW ALBRECHT AND HERR FREDERICH TALKED IN THE WOOD 211 XXII. HOW ALBRECHT RODE HOME 225 XXIII. HOW ERNA SUFFERED 234 XXIV. HOW COUNT STEPHEN MET HERR FREDERICH 242 XXV. HOW FATHER CHRISTOPHER SENT FOR ALBRECHT 252 XXVI. HOW ALBRECHT AND ERNA FORGAVE EACH OTHER 258 ALBRECHT. I HOW ONE WENT. Like a vast sea the mighty Schwarzwald stretched its forests of pine and its wide wastes of heather around Castle Rittenberg, its surface forever fretted into waves by the wind. Like the sea it seemed measureless, and the lands which lay beyond its borders appeared to the scattered dwellers in its valleys as remote as might appear the continents to the people of far islands. Like the sea, moreover, the Schwarzwald was peopled by strange beings, of whom alike the peasant folk who dwelt upon its borders, the rude churls whose huts stood here and there in clusters in its less intractable nooks, and the nobles whose castles overtopped the wilderness of trees and bracken, went always in secret dread. In the north lurked the hordes of the Huns, the terrible barbarians who from time to time descended, hardly human, upon the fertile lands which lay beyond the borders of the forest, swarming as they went upon whatever luckless castle lay in their path. The boldest knight might well tremble at the name of the ferocious Huns, and even the army of Charlemagne himself had hardly been able to cope with this foe. But more near at hand, and more terrible than even the Huns, were the strange creatures who abode in the forest, and who walked invisible at their will, the mysterious beings who lurked in dim recesses, and of whom men spoke only in awe-struck whispers. Even what they were it was not easy to say; and who could tell how they were offended or how to be placated? The nixies of the lakes and streams; the dwarfs and gnomes of cave and mountain; the kobolds, who were more daring and more human in appearance than either, so that haply a man might endanger not only his life but even his soul holding commerce with them, unsuspecting that they were not of his fellow mortals,--all these and many others dwelt in the shadowy recesses, and against these not even the hosts of the Great Emperor would avail.