Not so well known as _Undine_, but remarkable for its convincing realism and freedom from Gothic stock devices, is the _Amber Witch_ of Wilhelm Meinhold, another product of the German fantastic genius of the earlier nineteenth century. This tale, which is laid in the time of the Thirty Years' War, purports to be a clergyman's manuscript found in an old church at Coserow, and centres round the writer's daughter, Maria Schweidler, who is wrongly accused of witchcraft. She has found a deposit of amber which she keeps secret for various reasons, and the unexplained wealth obtained from this lends colour to the accusation; an accusation instigated by the malice of the wolf-hunting nobleman Wittich Appelmann, who has vainly pursued her with ignoble designs. The deeds of a real witch, who afterward comes to a horrible supernatural end in prison, are glibly imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a typical witchcraft trial with forced confessions under torture she is about to be burned at the stake when saved just in time by her lover, a noble youth from a neighbouring district. Meinhold's great strength is in his air of casual and realistic verisimilitude, which intensifies our suspense and sense of the unseen by half persuading us that the menacing events must somehow be either the truth or very close to the truth. Indeed, so thorough is this realism that a popular magazine once published the main points of _The Amber Witch_ as an actual occurrence of the seventeenth century! In the present generation German horror-fiction is most notably represented by Hanns Heinz Ewers who brings to bear on his dark conceptions an effective knowledge of modern psychology. Novels like _The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Alranae_, and short stories like _The Spider_ contain distinctive qualities which raise them to a classic level.