But just as the feast started there was a trifling hush, while with a great rustle into the hall swept my lady abbess of Quedlinburg and took her seat at my other hand. She might well have become a sculptured saint. It needed only to turn her black robes, the white frill of her cap, the pale pink of her face, into hard porphyry,--then the image would have been complete. In her youth Lady Theckla could not have been uncomely. The lines of her mouth were refined, but ungentle. She spoke to me in a clear monotone, opening her lips very little. The only lively thing about her seemed her steel-blue eyes. I did not love this close sight of the abbess. I told myself one might argue half eternity with that fine strong face, and win only denial; and as for pity or charity, you could more wisely beseech the stone saint, for then your prayers were at least heard up in heaven. Grievous to tell, her coming did not impose the least check upon the conversation of her brother and his boon companions, which was at all times unspeakably foul,--so foul that I winced as I looked across the table at Gräfin Ilsa, who sat silent and a little pale, while the great hall buzzed around her,--a very different person from the merry creature in the woodland and at the hunt. Graf Eckbert was so anxious to air his views that he graciously spared me the trouble of much speaking. He dominated the entire discussion, his other guests and his children giving respectful attention to his loudly delivered wisdom. That the world was awry, and Germany in particular, he informed me long before the platters of boars’ flesh had been replaced by those of venison. He cursed the Emperor Maximilian, whom he described as a shuffling dotard who starved Germany to feed his Austrian lands; he damned the last Imperial Diet as a gathering of fools; particularly he devoted to the pit the authors of the recent decree forbidding private warfare to the nobility. “As if we, Walter” (he appropriated my first name at the outset), “if _we_ fell into any merry little debate, could not settle it with our own good pikes and cross-bows, and not have to call in a snivelling, black-gowned clerk with a pen behind his ear, to draw up parchments, patter in Latin to a court, and then cheat us out of fair justice for a beggaring fee.” “Your Lordship does not believe in courts, then?” I ventured to ask. “Ay, by St. Laurenz, but not of that kind. Courts are for peasants. I hold court myself every Monday. Two fellows were triced up on the gallows the other day for cutting firewood in my forest! Zounds--they ought to have been drawn and quartered, but I am too tenderhearted!” A tear trickled down his nose at recollection of his signal mercy. “Your Lordship,” I said, “does exceeding well to avoid lawyers. There is an old Florentine proverb ‘may sorrow, evil, and lawyers be far from thee.’”