"Yes, my Gerlinda is well versed in the history of our house," said the Freiherr, triumphantly. "She remembers it even better than I do, for my memory is beginning to fail me. Yesterday she corrected me in a date, when I was speaking of the enfeoffment of Udo von Eberstein. You remember, my child?" As if the hitherto motionless pendulum of a clock had been set going by this question, Fräulein Gerlinda started off again and told a much longer story, this time from the fifteenth century, about a certain Eberstein who in a certain battle had saved the Emperor's life and had been by him endowed with a certain castle. All the hard names and the numerous dates fell from her lips with the greatest fluency and certainty, but with a monotony of intonation that reminded one of the clapper of a mill, the more so as her speech came to a pause as suddenly as it began. Hans involuntarily pushed back his chair a little, the whole scene partook of the supernatural. The Freiherr, however, who received this as an expression of admiration, seemed inclined to initiate him still further into the chronicles of his race, when the old clock in the corner struck the hour of nine. "Nine o'clock already," said Eberstein, as he rose from his chair. "We live very regularly, Herr von Wehlau, and are wont to retire at this hour, a custom which I doubt not your fatiguing ramble in the forest will make grateful to you. I wish you a calm and refreshing night in the Ebersburg." "That was terrible!" said Hans, with a sigh, when he found himself alone in his sleeping-room in the old castle. "That old man of the tenth century, and that little châtelaine whom I took for deaf and dumb, and who chatters out the old chronicles like a magpie, have nearly turned my brain. I am completely mediæval, and have become extremely exclusive since I have been Hans Wehlau Wehlenberg of the Forschungstein." Thereupon he went to bed, and dreamed that the old Freiherr was going through all Northern Germany with a lantern to find the Forschungstein, and that Fräulein Gerlinda, disguised as a magpie, was fluttering beside him, chattering incessantly about Kunrad von Eberstein and Hildegund von Ortenau; and when they could not find the Forschungstein, they seated themselves in the branches of their genealogical tree and ascended with it up, up and away into the tenth century, and a very imposing spectacle it was. When Hans waked the next morning the sun was shining brightly into his room, and his clothes were sufficiently dry to be donned. It was still very early, and no one seemed to be stirring in the house: so he resolved to inspect by daylight the house, which he had reached in darkness and storm. He issued from his room into the long corridor, which was lit by a narrow window, and without much difficulty succeeded in finding the winding staircase with the worn steps, by which he descended into the front hall and thence into the open air.