I do not pass on the truth of this story. Let every man be his own judge from the things which followed. I only know that I awakened that morning after a troubled sleep,--somewhat interrupted by roistering students in the street,--and lay long on my host’s great feather bed. I was very ill at ease. The interview of the preceding evening had shaken my self-complacency utterly. Here was I, Walter von Lichtenstein zum Regenstein, or Di Palaestro, as you wished, accounted young, high-born, rich, with a thousand puissant friends, with any fortune short of a dukedom open to me, a master fencer and dancer, learned in all that the Hellenes and Latins could give me from Thales to Hermes Trismegistus, able to write Italian sonnets and Latin orations, to criticize a picture, to defend a philosophy--and yet I was profoundly dissatisfied with this ‘myself’, and must needs ask the reason? And the answer presently came--that it was because since I had come to Germany, I had met two persons,--a mountain maiden and more lately an Augustinian friar. They had taught me that there was another world of moral and spiritual values wherein I had not so much as entered. Gräfin Ilsa had perhaps only reached the threshold of that new Empire; and pitiful indeed were her pains and stumblings whilst she tried to enter in. Martin Luther had long since passed inside, and what he had said to me sounded as strange words,--tales by a traveller from the far Antipodes, telling of things he had seen, but which the common language was too feeble to paint to the unimaginative dwellers at home. The problem baffled me. Left thus without solution I fell into a kind of anger, not at these twain, but at myself. After all, I was not so wise as my conceit had told me. Well, then, years were still left to learn. Should I not attack this new problem in the same cold scientific spirit in which Messere Leonardo da Vinci attacked a new problem in engineering or architecture? And the solution could not fail too long in the finding. That morning I roamed the long street of Wittenberg, half expecting to meet Dr. Luther, but he kept to his convent, and I began to suspect my arguments had carried their weight after all. It was a clear, cold, windy morning. I was glad of my cloak. Walking eastward from the town, I came to the mighty Elbe winding its swift course along the sear autumn plain. A few sail-boats were struggling with the wind and current, but most of the level brown country was deserted. Finding little of interest, I returned again to the town, where I found a procession winding along, escorting a newly capped graduate in his magister’s gown and hood, surrounded by various University dignitaries,--all headed for some friendly wein-stube and a merry afternoon. But just as the company disappeared in the tavern, I saw two monkish figures coming westward from the Augustinian Convent and headed for the Schloss-Kirche; and at sight of one of those figures I made haste to follow after them.