"As I was saying," pursued the baron, lolling back in his chair and applying to his nose Mrs. Bentley's magnificent essence-bottle, "when I give these _fêtes_ to my serfs, I regale them with Westphalia hams from my own hunting-grounds, and with hock from my own vineyards." "Dear me! ham and hock!" ejaculated Mrs. Quimby. "Baron," said Miss Turretville, "I suppose you have visited the Hartz mountains?" "My castle stands on one of them." "Charming! Then you have seen the Brocken?" "It is directly in front of my ramparts." "How delightful! Do you never imagine that on a stormy night you hear the witches riding through the air, to hold their revels on the Brocken? Are there still brigands in the Black Forest?" "Troops of them. The Black Forest is just back of my own woods. The robbers were once so audacious as to attack my castle, and we had a bloody fight. But we at length succeeded in taking all that were left alive." "What a pity! Was their captain anything like Charles de Moor?" "Just such a man." "Baron," observed Myrtilla, a little mischievously, "the situation of your castle must be _unique_; in the midst of the Hartz mountains, at the falls of the Rhine, with the Brocken in front, and the Black Forest behind." "You doat on the place, don't you?" asked Miss Turretville. "Do you live there always?" "No; only in the hunting season. I am equally at home in all the capitals of the continent. I might, perhaps, be chiefly at my native place, Vienna, only my friend, the emperor, is never happy but when I am with him; and his devotion to me is rather overwhelming. The truth is, one gets surfeited with courts, and kings, and princes; so I thought it would be quite refreshing to take a trip to America, having great curiosity to see what sort of a place it is. I recollect, at the last court ball, the emperor was teazing me to waltz with his cousin, the Archduchess of Hesse Hoblingen, who, he feared, would be offended if I neglected her. But her serene highness dances as if she had a cannon-ball chained to each foot, and so I got off by flatly telling my friend the emperor that if women chose to go to balls in velvet and ermine, and with coronets on their heads, they might get princes or some such people to dance with them; as for my part, it was rather excruciating to whirl about with persons in heavy royal robes!" "Is it possible!" exclaimed Miss Turretville, "did you venture to talk so to an emperor? Of course before next day you were loaded with chains and immured in a dungeon; from which I suppose you escaped by a subterranean passage." "Not at all; my old crony the emperor knows his man; so he only laughed and slapped me on the shoulder, and I took his arm, and we sauntered off together to the other end of the grand saloon. I think I was in my hussar uniform; I recollect that evening I broke my quizzing glass, and had to borrow the Princess of Saxe Blinkenberg's."