The good nobleman was by no means alone in his vehemence. In the tap-room of the inn at Dessau, where we broke the journey, I was silent witness to a colloquy betwixt a stout, shrewd Leipzig merchant coming from Lubeck with salt-cod and soap, and a strong-lunged, red-nosed creature who wished to be taken for a friar. The latter had liquor in his crown, and had been delivering himself against Wittenberg as “tainted with heresy,” and its professor as “a mad man, a seducer, and a wizard possessed by the devil.” As he paused for breath the merchant charged in on him heartily. “Crack-brain and wizard, is he? Well, who, Master Friar, is responsible for his folly?” “Why, the devil, of course.” “Say, rather, those long-frocked devils, you ‘cheese hunters,’[6] whereof your Tetzel is the master fiend.” “_Malefice!_” howled the friar, “what have we here,--a Bohemian infidel?” “A poor honest Christian, and much at your worshipful service,” the merchant was just drunk enough to bow ironically, “and of a mind to tell you that your merry dance is nearly over, and that the musicians will be asking their penny. Rome is your city; go there then, and ask alms of your ‘Apostolic Father.’ We Germans grow weary.” “Don’t blaspheme the holy Pope,” stormed the other. “I can’t blaspheme what isn’t holy. You’ve heard the saying, ‘If hell there be, Rome is built over it.’ Just as the wolf preached and sung masses to gather the geese around him, and then ate them all, so priest and prelate promise all things, and pretend to love our souls till they get their benefices, and then--prutt!” his diatribe ended with a contemptuous gesture. “Is there no man here,” cried the friar at the top of his voice, “to hale this fellow to the inquisitor?” “Is there no man here to hale this fellow to the horse pond,” retorted the merchant, and a dozen hands were ready to obey the suggestion, when the host enforced a kind of truce. The friar slunk away, not one in the tap-room failing to fling ribaldry after him. When I went out, a tapster was telling amid roars how Tetzel had sold an indulgence for _premeditated_ assault and robbery to a Saxon nobleman and had been _himself_ a few days later soundly thrashed, then pillaged by his pious customer; while another traveller had already recited how the Wittenberg students had burned a copy of Tetzel’s counter theses, as being in turn heretical, “giving them the fate, God knows, which they deserve.”