"Well, if you are so well acquainted with the movements of the League, as you pretend to be," said the pedlar, with something of a haughty mien, "you will be able to give us the last intelligence respecting the state of Tübingen." "It whistles out of its last hole," answered the rawbone man; "I was there but a short time ago, and saw most formidable preparations for the siege." "Eh!--what?" whispered the inquisitive burghers among themselves, and drew nearer, expecting to hear some important news. The thin man leaned back on his chair, grasped the handle of his sword with his long fingers, stretched out his legs a yard further, and said, with an air of triumph, "Yes, yes, my friends, it looks very bad there; the surrounding places in the neighbourhood have suffered; all the fruit trees have been cut down, the town and castle furiously bombarded, the former having already surrendered. Forty knights, indeed, still defend the castle; but they cannot hold out their tottering walls much longer!" "What tottering walls do you talk of?" cried the fat man; "whoever has seen the castle of Tübingen, must not talk of tottering walls. Are there not two deep ditches on the side towards the mountains, which no ladder of the League can scale, and walls twelve feet thick, with high towers, whence the falconets keep up no insignificant fire, I can tell you?" "Battered down, battered down!" cried the thin man, with such a fearful hollow voice, as made the astonished burghers think they heard the falling of the towers of Tübingen about their ears: "the new tower, which Ulerich lately built, was battered down by Fronsberg, as if it had never stood there." "But everything is not lost with that," answered the pedlar; "the knights make sallies from the castle, and many a one has found his bed in the Neckar. Old Fronsberg had his hat shot from his head, which makes his ears tingle to this day, I'll be bound." "There you are wrong again," said the thin man, carelessly; "sallies, indeed! the besiegers have light cavalry enough, who fight like devils; they are Greeks; but whether they come from the Ganges or Epirus, I know not, and are called Stratiots, commanded by George Samares, who does not allow a dog of them to sally out of their holes."[1] "He also has been made to bite the grass," replied the pedlar, with a scornful side glance: "the dogs, as you call them, did make a sally, in spite of the Greeks, and made their leader prisoner, and----" "Samares prisoner?" cried the rawbone man, startled out of his tranquillity; "you are not right again, friend!" "No?" answered the other, quietly; "I heard the bells toll, as he was buried in the church of Saint George."