Drost Aagé retired to rest in silence, but he vainly tried to sleep. He was uncertain whether he ought not instantly to have captured the two overbearing Hanseatics on the ground of their former menace at Sjöberg; here they were no longer ambassadors and privileged persons. If they had circulated false coin, and openly protected an outlaw upon Danish ground, they might with strict justice be called to account. The knowledge that the base Kaggé still lived also disquieted him; but what still more banished sleep from the Drost's eyes, was the idea of the mysterious Master Thrand, and his wondrous arts. That a human being possessed such a power over nature as to be able to imitate the thunder and lightning of the heavens, with all their terrific effects, appeared to him an amazing prodigy, and what the enthusiastic Master Laurentius had said of the still deeper views of his master--of the preservation of youth by a mysterious art, and of the philosopher's stone, as something actually existent in nature, had especially inspired the meditative and somewhat visionary Aagé with singular musings. The countenance and mountebank deportment of the little deformed philosopher, had, indeed, awakened great doubts of his honesty, and what Aagé had comprehended of his expressions appeared to him strange and confused, as opposed to what he had been piously taught in childhood regarding the highest and eternal truths in which, despite his unhappy excommunication, he had been confirmed by his confessor, Master Petrus de Dacia, who had succeeded in making him at peace with himself and the church. But the Iceland clerk's ardent enthusiasm for Master Thrand and his worldly wisdom had not been without its effect; and Aagé was forced to confess there lay an acuteness and intelligence in the little mountebank's eye which he had never seen equalled in any of the pious and learned men he knew. Laurentius's open and ingenuous countenance bore witness also to the truth of his testimony as to what he had seen and admired in the disciple of the famous Roger Bacon; and the longer Aagé pondered on what he had heard, the more doubts and strange thoughts crowded upon his mind. Master Thrand's contempt of the age in which he lived, and the confidence with which he expressed himself respecting the only true revelation of nature with which he was, above all, conversant, had also excited a feeling of strange and painful uneasiness in Aagé's mind. The melancholy knight had often, when oppressed by the thought of his excommunication, sought peace and tranquillity in the contemplation of nature in lonely nights under a calm and starry sky, without, however, feeling able to dispense with the comfort and consolation of the church. He now stood, with his arms folded, in his sleeping chamber, gazing out on the gloomy heavens. "Were it possible!" said he to himself. "Am I wandering here with all my contemporaries in thick darkness? Know we neither our own nature nor