They all went forward to one of the many small windows, and looked in. The men were sitting in a picturesque undress round the table, their long-bowled china pipes in their fingers or mouth, and chopins of pale-yellow wine before them. Grete’s father was standing by, laughing and joking with them; the old grandmother from time to time replenishing the tall transparent bottles. They had all been singing the elaborate chorus to the hunting-song, "Im Wald und auf der Haide"—all except the ancient Spiegelmann, who sat solemnly over his pipe-tube, and winked his small black eyes occasionally, as if trying to shut in the internal pleasure the rattling melody gave him. His large black moustache caught the tobacco-smoke that issued from his lips; and his wrinkled weather-tanned face, like the other sunburnt faces around, caught a bronzed glow from the solitary candle before him. "The Spiegelmann missed a buck in the second drive," said one. "He will pay the forfeit of a song." "I was driving, not shooting, the roe," growled the Spiegelmann, though he was not displeased to be asked to sing. All at once, before any of his comrades were prepared, the venerable keeper, blinking fiercely, began to sing, in a low, querulous, plaintive voice, the first stanza of a well-known ballad, which ran somewhat in this fashion— "’Twas into the forest three sportsmen went, On shooting the white deer they were bent." Suddenly, and while Miss Brunel fancied that the old man was singing a pathetic song of his youth, there rang out a great hoarse chorus from a dozen bass voices—the time struck by a couple of dozen horny hands on the table— "Husch, husch! bang, bang! trara!" Then Spiegelmann, gravely and plaintively as before, took up the thread of the wondrous story— "They laid themselves down beneath a fir-tree, And a wonderful dream then dreamed the three, (_All._) Husch, husch! bang, bang! trara!" Here a tall Italian-looking keeper, who hailed from the Tyrol, and who was sitting next to Spiegelmann, sang forth the experiences of the first dreamer— "I dreamt that as I went beating the bush, There ran out before me the deer—husch, husch!" His neighbour, Bagel, who had once been complimented by Kaiser Francis of Austria, and was never done with the story, personated the second dreamer— "And as from the yelp of the beagle he sprang, I riddled his bide for him there—bang, bang!" The third from Spiegelmann, a short stout little man, called Falz, who had once been a clockmaker in Whitechapel, was the next dreamer— "So soon as the deer on the ground I saw, I merrily sounded my horn—trara!" The burden of the tale now returned to Spiegelmann, who thus finished it, and pointed the moral—