"Oh, nothing," said her fond spouse, "only that d----d Poltergeist again, who seems bent upon burning us all in our beds before he has done with us." "Hush!" said his wife, "don't swear, or he may do as you say in real earnest. Come to bed now, or to-morrow you won't be able to get up in time. Remember----" "Ah, true; I must have my night's rest, as it would not do for my hand to tremble to-morrow when I mount the scaffold. _Gute nacht, mein Herr._" And our worthy host followed his partner out of the room, leaving my ancestor to his reflections. "Well," soliloquised my relative, "of all the strange adventures that ever occurred to me, this beats all. Oh! there is not the slightest doubt that what I have just witnessed is the work of the infernal powers--some diabolical agency. "When I see a knife jump up from the table by itself without anyone near and deliberately fix itself in the panel of the door before my very eyes; when I see a bottle of spirit overturned and broken in pieces, and then a candle after that knocked over as if on purpose to ignite the spirit, and withal no way of accounting for such a phenomenon; moreover, when I see plates and dishes hurled from one end of the room to the other, and apparently aimed at people's heads, and yet the perpetrator of such pranks has the power of making himself invisible to the naked eye, then, I say, this is not through human agency, but something superhuman, and as it is not exactly an angelic mode of proceeding, it must be the reverse." My ancestor shuddered, and crossed himself. The manifestations, however, had ceased for the night, and in five minutes our weary traveller was fast asleep. His dreams that night were not of the pleasantest. He imagined that he mounted the scaffold with a crowd of eager eyes gazing at him, amongst whom were his friends and travelling companions. His host, the Scharfrichter, stood brandishing his terrible two-handed sword, and in another moment his head would have been off, but at the critical time the dream changed, and he was being pelted with crockery in the midst of a cemetery at night by innumerable sheeted "poltergeister." These and such-like visions were flitting before his brain, when a loud thump at the door brought him back to earth again. There was the Scharfrichter before him, not in dressing gown and slippers, as on the previous evening, but attired in doublet and hose of a blood red, a black _barello_ with scarlet cock's feather. "Now then, mein Herr," said the headsman, taking down his fearful instrument from the wall, "time's up." My ancestor, only just awake, rubbed his eyes and imagined that he was really and truly called away to execution, and that his last hour had come. The executioner, seeing that he hesitated, added: "If you want to witness the cunning of my hand, now's your time."