_Three days later._--I have scratched out the last nine pages of my journal word for word. The occupation did me good. This episode is wiped out from the pages of my life. Lohengrin is dead to me. There is one thing that comforts me--I now have an unhappy love. I always envied Lina a little for hers, she put on such airs about it. Unhappy loves are so very interesting and poetic. [Illustration: “HOW DISTINGUISHED AND ELEGANT HE LOOKED.”] P.S.--In future I shall fall in love only with gentlemen in uniforms. You have something you can depend on then, and the world is so false and deceitful nowadays. _H. von Kahlenberg._ [Illustration: “PLANTED HIMSELF SQUARELY BEFORE THE SCRIBENT, AND STARED AT HIM IN SILENCE.”] _WOOING THE GALLOWS._ IN the year 1594 the town-scribent of Nördlingen had an extraordinary visitor. A herculean lad of about twenty, unkempt and ragged, came to the court-room one morning, planted himself squarely before the scribent, and stared at him in silence. Unto the gruffly put question, “What do you want?” he answered no less gruffly, “A rope!” The town-scribent told him he had come to the wrong door, the rope-maker lived around the corner. But the fellow replied to the effect that he did not need the rope-maker, but the hangman; he wanted to be hanged. The town-scribent shivered, for he thought the stranger was crazy. He therefore called a vigorous servant before entering further into this extraordinary conversation. The stranger now confessed himself to be a homeless tramp, called by his companions Jörg Muckenhuber, and his language being pieced together out of as many rags of dialect as his coat was of rags of cloth, there was no further certificate required to make it evident that he was at home everywhere and nowhere. He then proceeded to relate briefly and coldly how several weeks ago he had murdered a travelling pedlar upon the precincts of Nördlingen, and also between Augsburg and Kaufbeuern a foreign Jew. Both the Jew and the pedlar gave him no peace at night, so he wanted to be hanged, and as the last murder had been perpetrated on the ground of Nördlingen, so the senate of that town could not refuse to hang him on the Nördlingen gallows. The town-scribent swore furiously, and said it wasn’t every fool could have that for the asking, the town of Nördlingen had built its gallows for its own citizens and not for villainous vagrants; at the same time Muckenhuber was taken into custody, and the scribent presented the affair to the senate. The senators put their heads together without coming to any definite conclusion as to whether the lad was a fool or a desperate villain. As it was customary, however, in those days to cast the insane into the same dungeon as thieves and murderers, Jörg Muckenhuber was put in safe keeping in the tower, and the business was getting under way in a most correct manner, whatever further details might be brought to light.