"Oh, that's nothing," most ungallantly replied the boy. "Franz-Joseph walks about our streets like Haroun-al-Raschid used to in the Arabian Nights. _Any_ one can see the Emperor; he allows even the poorest to come and see him in his palace every week; and he talks to them just as if he was a plain, ordinary man and not an emperor at all." [Illustration: EMPEROR FRANZ-JOSEPH.] "Well, I've had him speak to me," answered Teresa. "At the convent he praised my work." There was a dead silence. Herr Müller walked along, not a muscle in his face betraying the fact that he had overheard this juvenile conversation, for fear of interrupting a most entertaining dialogue. "Has he ever spoken _directly_ to you?" demanded the girl, seeing that Ferdinand did not reply. "No." Again a dead silence. "The Emperor needs our love and sympathy," said Herr Müller, after waiting in vain for the children to renew their talk; "his beloved empress Elizabeth has been taken from him by an assassin's hand; his favorite brother Maximilian went to his doom in the City of Mexico, the victim of the ambition of a Napoleon; even his heir, the crown-prince is dead; and when our beloved king shall be no more, the very name of Habsburg will have passed away." "He is a very kind man," replied Teresa. "He comes often to the convent; and he makes us feel that he is not an emperor but one of us." Herr Müller touched his hat in respect. "Long live our beloved emperor, our most sympathetic friend," he said. By this time they had gained the entrance of their home; Joseph opened the public door to admit them to the corridor, and they ascended to the third floor to the apartment of Herr Müller. CHAPTER II DER STOCK IM EISEN THAT evening, after a hearty dinner, the children called for the story of Der Stock im Eisen. And so Herr Müller began: "Many hundreds of years ago, in the old square known as the Horsemarket, lived Vienna's most skilful master-locksmith, Herr Erhanrd Marbacher. Next door to him, stood a baker-shop owned by the Widow Mux. The widow and Herr Marbacher were good neighbors, and were fond of chatting together outside the doors of their homes, as the evening came on; Herr Marbacher smoking his long, quaintly-painted pipe, and the Widow Mux relating the sprightly anecdotes of the day. "But, one evening, Herr Marbacher found the widow in great distress; as she usually wore a merry smile upon her jolly face this change in temperament greatly affected the spirits of the locksmith, and he demanded the cause of her unhappiness. With tears in her eyes, the widow confided to her neighbor the dreadful fact that her younger son, Martin, a worthless, idle fellow, had refused to do any work about the shop, and had even used harsh words. "'Sometimes it happens,' suggested the master-locksmith, 'that a lad does not take to his forced employment; it may be that Martin is not cut out for a baker; let me have a hand with him; perhaps he will make a first-rate locksmith.'