"His curse took immediate effect. Frau Hütt was at once struck by remorse. The glow of exercise fled from her cheeks, and she began to feel chilly and faint, and to think of returning home; but she shuddered at the thought of repassing the beggar's mangled corpse. And when at last she attempted to check her steed and head him for the valley, she found with horror that the brute had acquired a will of his own and would no longer obey the bit; and when she tried to hurl herself from the saddle, it was only to discover that she was firmly fastened to her seat and could not move from it. So horse and rider rushed upward higher and higher, upward through the frosty mountain air and over the frozen mountain snow, and all the time Frau Hütt grew colder and colder, and felt the very blood in her veins ceasing to circulate, and her muscles becoming so stiffened that she could not even shiver. And when they had reached the summit of the mountain where people in the valley might best see her and be best warned by her fate, the palfrey rested, and Frau Hütt's whole body became what her heart always was,--stone. "And even unto this day, once every year at a certain midnight, when the air is silent except for here and there the crowing of a cock, and the continuous gurgle of our rivers rushing to the sea, a mist arises from the muddy waters of the river Inn and thickens into a cloud and floats northward; and when it approaches Frau Hütt, it slowly takes the form of a beggar with head uncovered and hands outstretched as if for alms; and then the upper part of the mountain trembles visibly, just for all the world like a mortal shuddering in the presence of some ghastly horror. "And have I seen this myself?" repeated our kind informant. "No, indeed; and I suppose if I were to ask the same question of the person who told me the story, he would reply, after the fashion of all ghost-story tellers, that his mother's first husband knew a gentleman whose aunt's next-door neighbor was reported to have seen it often. At any rate, one cannot easily watch for the spectre, because nobody knows the date of its annual appearance. 'And how in the world could a woman and her horse ever become so monstrously large as to form the peak of that great, big mountain?' Oh, that is easily answered. They did not become so. They always were so, for it all happened in the days of the giants." CASPAR PISCHL. * * * * *