He was passing the Witch’s hut, which stood at the end of the town, close by the Rhine. No one called her by her real name, Graettel, but only by the name of the Witch. She gave potions to lovelorn maidens and exorcised evil spirits from unclean bodies. He suddenly stopped. For a bare second he imagined a mermaid had leaped to the shore. Surely no mermaid had finer golden hair shimmering with iridescent colors! Filled with a sense of mystery, strangely mingled with slumbering memories of the past, he took a step nearer the straw-thatched hovel but at the sound of his footsteps the skein of golden hair was lifted as if by an invisible hand and presently he beheld a pair of great dark eyes peering at him. Again he thought it an optic illusion, but the sweet murmurs of the Rhine were in his ears, a thousand legends of the ruins of castles in his brain, the mermaids of folklore in his memory; a forest singer was balancing himself on a bough of the large elm in front of the hut, singing a melody of his own. Then a peal of laughter—the musical laughter of a sweet girlish voice—and the apparition vanished. Albert was breathing fast, his whole frame aquiver. The next moment he took a step forward and remained standing at the open door. A glance within revealed no change since he had visited here with his nurse in his childhood, and there was but little change without. He stood at the threshold and peered inside with increased curiosity, seeing no one. It seemed empty save for an unpainted table and a few backless chairs—the same as of old. A warbling song—a folksong he used to hear in his childhood—reached his ears. It was sung in a minor key, and that in suppressed tones. Soon the melody ceased and the great dark eyes peeped out of the opening of a partition, the body hidden from view. “Hedwiga!” he cried and stepped inside. A barefooted girl emerged, her head bent sideways, running a comb through her long reddish golden tresses. She continued combing her hair unconcernedly, a bewitching smile in her eyes. “Hedwiga, how you have grown!” Albert cried gleefully, staring at her tall, slender form, her thin skirt clinging to her legs “like the wet drapery of a statue.” Gathering her golden mane in her left hand she tossed it back and, pulling a hair pin from between her lips, fastened it close to the roots, the ends hanging loosely down over her shoulders. “You have grown, too,” she presently said, looking at him with her large candid eyes. Then she added, “I am already sixteen, going on seventeen.” “So am I sixteen,” he caught his breath, thrilled at the thought of being the same age as she. “Do you remember me?” “You are Zippel’s boy (Zippel had been his nurse)—of course, I remember you. Don’t you remember how we used to play in the yard while Aunt Graettel and Zippel talked and talked and talked—”