"They are great rough boors, and they pride themselves on the stories related for generations back of their prodigious strength, and as they are wealthy, they can do pretty much what they please. The father of the Roettmann, whose wife Otto is gone to-night to visit, is reported to have had so powerful a voice, that once when he shouted to a forester, the man staggered back. His chief pleasure consisted in rolling up into balls, the tin plates used at dinner at different inns. The present Roettmann, when he went to a dance, was in the habit of stuffing into his long pockets a dozen of the heavy iron axes, used for splitting wood, called _Speidel_ by the country people, so that every one got out of his way, and left him ample space to dance. His greatest delight was to dance for twenty-four hours without stopping; this was only amusement to him, and in the pauses between the dances, he drank quart after quart of wine unceasingly. In order to ascertain, however, how much he had drunk, and what he had to pay, he tore off a button each time, first off his red waistcoat, and then off his coat, and redeemed them at the end of the evening from the landlord. His old father, with the stentorian voice, once forbad him to remain all day at a wedding at Wenger, but, on the contrary, enjoined on him to mow down a grass meadow in the valley of Otterzwang. The Roettmaenner have always enforced the strictest discipline among themselves. The obedient son followed his father's injunctions. Danced like mad all night, and in the morning, the loud voiced father, coming into the meadow, heard music, 'What is that? a man mowing, and he looks so strange?' The father comes nearer, sees his son mowing busily according to his orders, but carrying a basket on his back, and in the basket a fiddler, playing indefatigably, till the meadow was mown from end to end, and then he danced back to the Wenger wedding with the fiddler on his back. There is a proverb, that anything may be stolen, except a mill-stone and a bar of red-hot iron; but Speidel-Roettmann did once steal a mill-stone, or at least displace it. Wishing to play a trick to the forest-miller, he rolled the mill-stone one night half-way up the hill. Speidel-Roettmann had two sons, Vincent and Adam; the eldest, Vincent, was not particularly strong, but as sharp and spiteful as a lynx; a quality he inherited from his mother, for the Roettmanns, though untamed and fierce, are not malicious. It seems that Vincent tormented the wood-cutters like a slave-driver. One day he was killed by the falling of a tree. It was said, and the former clergyman always declared it was so, that the wood-cutters had killed him on purpose. Since that day the mother, who never, was of a kindly nature, has become a perfect dragon, and would gladly poison every one. She is the only person who cordially hates my husband, for she wished him to question closely every dying peasant to whom he might be summoned, whether he had anything to