“The clatter of their horses’ hoofs struck upon the heart of the conscious chaplain, as though the animals themselves were trampling on his bosom; but he summoned up his resolution, and relying on his sacred character, met his master with a firm step and a calm eye, in the hall of the castle. Evading a direct answer to the first enquiry for Etelina, he gradually and cautiously informed Sir Reinhard of her love, her marriage, and her flight. Astonishment for a short space held the old warrior spell-bound, but when his gathered fury at last found vent, the wrath of the whirlwind was less terrible. He seized the poor old monk by the throat, and upon his firm refusal to reveal the retreat of the culprits, dashed him to the earth, had him bound hand and foot, and flung into a pit beneath an iron grating in the floor of the donjon or keep of the castle. Tearing, like an infuriated Pasha, ‘his very beard for ire,’ he called down curses on Etelina and her husband, and prayed that, if ever he forgave them, a dreadful and sudden death might overtake him on the spot where he should revoke the malediction he now uttered! Upwards of a year had elapsed when, one winter day, the Knight of Greifenstein, pursuing the chase, lost his way in the mazes of a wilderness on the banks of the Danube. A savage-looking being, half clothed in skins, conducted him to a cavern, in which a woman similarly attired was seated on the ground, with an infant on her knees, and greedily gnawing the bones of a wolf--Sir Reinhard recognised in the squalid form before him his once beautiful Etelina. Shocked to the soul at the sight of the misery to which his severity had reduced her, he silently motioned to the huntsmen, who came straggling in upon his track to remove the wretched pair and their poor little offspring to the castle. Moved by the smiles of his innocent and unconscious grandchild he clasped his repentant daughter to his bosom, as she recrossed the threshold, bore her up into the banquet hall, and consigning her to the arms of her faithful Rudolph, hastened down again to release with his own hands the true-hearted monk, who still languished in captivity. In descending the steep staircase his foot slipped, and he was precipitated to the bottom--his fall was unseen--his cry was unheard--dying, he dragged himself a few paces along the pavement, and expired upon the very spot where he had just embraced and forgiven his daughter. Rudolph, now Lord of Greifenstein, restored the chaplain to liberty, and lived long and happily with his beloved Etelina; but the spirit of Sir Reinhard to this day wanders about the ruins of his ancestral castle, and will continue so to do till the stone whereon he expired shall be worn in twain. ‘Alas! poor ghost!’ the very slight hollow which is at present perceivable in it, affords you little hope of its division by fair means previously to the general ‘_crack_ of doom.’”