The room was very still for a moment. I rose awkwardly and took my cap. “Reverend Doctor,” I said stiffly, moving towards the door, “I leave you. I have no other arguments. I could have refuted you out of Aristotle, Plato, or Aquinas, but not out of the Psalter. And I pray one prayer--that all whereof I have warned may prove forever untrue.” But as I was going out, he came over to me, and with a familiarity impossible to resent laid his hand with honest brotherly touch upon my shoulder. “Oh, dear young Graf,” said he, lapsing out of Latin into Saxon; “forgive my bluntness. My heart is moved for you. Truly I fear you have been in Italy, where a ‘bon Christian,’ as they say, of our old German honesty and piety is utterly despised. Somehow your manner tells me the word and love of Christ is not the thing most precious in your sight. Oh! seek humbly for a new and better mind,--be not Italian, but German; for whether Martin Luther lives or dies, the Fatherland will have need for all brave young nobles such as you.” How could I answer this? The whole interview had been one of strange sensations. “Dear Doctor,” I said, with churlish simplicity, “be sure I shall remember all you say.” * * * * * Once back at the Steinitz mansion, the Freiherr inquired the success of my errand. “I have failed absolutely,” I replied. “I have battered my head against a stone wall. But,” I added, “your friar Martin is the noblest fool in Germany. Doomed to be silenced, probably to be burned: I admire and honor him still!” FOOTNOTES: [3] Heads of the City Council. [4] A kind of half-assistant, half disciple of a German professor. [5] A favorite psalm of Luther’s. CHAPTER X THE HAMMER STROKES Long afterward I heard the story that on the night of October 30th of that year of grace, 1517, while the Elector Frederick of Saxony tarried at Schweinitz (a goodly distance from Wittenberg) he dreamed a dream, which in the morning he said “he could not forget, though he lived a thousand years.” A monk there had been, a son of Paul the Apostle, writing upon the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, and in letters so large they could be read clear in Schweinitz, and using a goose-quill of such a length that it reached to Rome, pierced there the ear of a lion, so that it roared with pain, and then struck the triple crown of the Pope, so that it nigh toppled from his head.