"One moment more!" whispered the captive. "Pull up--all is ready," he continued, after a short pause. Morten hastily drew up the string, and found a sheet of parchment rolled up in the skin of the sausage, which was fastened to it: he carefully concealed it. "Hush! they wake!" he whispered. "I must set to work again." So saying, the portly cook rolled himself on the floor among the intoxicated and half-awakened turnkeys, and began to belabour them with all his might. "Hollo, there! now for a beating of meat!" he shouted, "now for a pounding of pepper! How come we by this lump in the porridge? It must be well beaten out." "Oh, oh! Art thou mad, Morten!" cried Niels the horseman. "Have done with thy chatter, I know what I am about," continued Morten, still laying about him. "I am neither mad nor drunk; but the devil take me if I stay longer here!--must you, clod-pates, have your say too, and fancy yourselves wiser than the cook? Would you make me believe I have horsemen in the pot?" While Morten thus shouted and talked, as though intoxicated to an excess he overturned the lamp, reeled in the dark out of the chamber, and rolled himself down the stairs. When the keepers, on the following morning, had recovered the full use of their senses the cook had disappeared, and was nowhere to be found in the castle. CHAP. II. At sunrise next morning, the brisk broad-shouldered cook, with a large club in his hand, took his way through the wood skirting Esrom Lake[7], accompanied by two other wanderers. It was a foggy morning; large flocks of wild geese flew with shrill cries over the lake, and the fallen leaves of the forest were swept along the path by the sharp morning breeze. The cook and his companions proceeded in silence and with hasty steps; and it was not until the sun began to disperse the cold mists of morning, that Morten cleared his throat, and sang a merry ballad. His companions were two strong broad-shouldered fellows, with red wadmal cloaks, over dirty leathern breeches, and with broad swords and daggers in their thickly padded belts, which also appeared to serve them as purses. They had the appearance of deserters or dismissed men-at-arms; they both wore beards in the fashion of king's horsemen, but seemed to have long neglected all attention to cleanliness and personal neatness. Their unwashed faces betokened want of sleep and fitting rest. The heads of a couple of flails served them as walking staves. They bore on their backs large bundles of rich attire, from which pieces of smoked meat and other provisions protruded. Their long uncombed hair hung about their shoulders; the skin and hair of both were so dark, and their countenances had so little of a Danish cast, that they would have passed for foreigners, had not their dialect proclaimed them to be peasants from Lolland; who, at any rate, could not prove their evidently Vandal extraction in the first generation.