Heinz than for fear of its becoming annulled by disuse. Had a daughter instead of a son been born to him, he had a right to save the poor girl who had fallen victim to a base seducer. So was it set forth in the headsman’s charter. Berthold Benz traces back his recollections to a very early period of his childhood, and in his manner of narrating them there is a quaint sad simplicity, by no means unattractive. “My mother, God help her!” he says, “right well do I remember her; and though I should live a hundred and many hundred years, I still shall ever have her before me, with her kindly blue eyes and her ringlets of the same colour as the flax which she drew from the distaff with her slender white fingers, and sent whirling round the spindle. We were always alone; my father went about his affairs, and of the servants none came near us in our apartment, or in our little flower-garden—parted by hedge and fence from the rest of the court—save and except fat Grethel, a sturdy broad-footed Swabian girl, my mother’s cousin, and taken in by her for the love of God.” And Berthold was happy at his mother’s knee, and in his childish fancy deemed the headsman’s hereditary dwelling, with its high surrounding wall, to be little short of a fortress, and held the vaulted sitting-room, with its three narrow windows, at least equal to any hall in the proud castle that towered upon the cliff beyond the stream. But his tranquil happiness lasted not long; the troubles of the doomster’s son had an early beginning. “On a sudden, my dearest mother wept more than she smiled, grew pale and yet paler, weak and still more weak, until at last she was unable to lead me out into the garden. At the same time I ceased to see my father. Neither at meals, nor as formerly, in the chamber, of a morning, was he visible, and however early I got up, the answer to my questions always was that he had already gone out. And one day, Heaven only knows how it happened, dear mother was gone, and when I screamed and wept for her, Swabian Grethel beat me, and said that ‘_she_ was my mother now.’” From this day, Berthold’s sufferings began. Hated by his stepmother, neglected by his father, who was infatuated with his young wife,—he was left to run wild with the executioner’s assistants. After a while, a brother was born, and then his lot became still harder. He was sent to sleep amongst the hay in the loft; and the sole notice he obtained from his father was when the latter instructed him in the duties of his office. But old Benz was a harsh teacher, and the child preferred to receive his lessons from Arnulph, the chief assistant, who took him with him to the town and on rambles in the forest; taught him to sever cabbage-heads at a single stroke, and told him, as they sat together upon the top of the lonely gallows-tree, wonderful tales and strange anecdotes of their craft and its professors. These Berthold drank in with greedy ear; and, although terrified at