Mr. Clinch stopped the flow of those Justice-Shallow-like reminiscences by an uneasy exclamation. He was thinking of the maiden who had disappeared so suddenly. The baron misinterpreted his nervousness. “What ho, within there!--Max, Wolfgang,--lazy rascals! Bring some wine.” At the baleful word Mr. Clinch started to his feet. “Not for me! Bring me none of your body-and-soul-destroying poison! I've enough of it!” The baron stared. The servitors stared also. “I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Clinch, recalling himself slowly; “but I fear that Rhine wine does not agree with me.” The baron grinned. Perceiving, however, that the three servitors grinned also, he kicked two of them into obscurity, and felled the third to the floor with his fist. “Hark ye, nephew,” he said, turning to the astonished Clinch, “give over this nonsense! By the mitre of Bishop Hatto, thou art as big a fool as he!” “Hatto,” repeated Clinch mechanically. “What! he of the Mouse Tower?” “Ay, of the Mouse Tower!” sneered the baron. “I see you know the story.” “Why am I like him?” asked Mr. Clinch in amazement. The baron grinned. “HE punished the Rhenish wine as thou dost, without judgment. He had--” “The jim-jams,” said Mr. Clinch mechanically again. The baron frowned. “I know not what gibberish thou sayest by 'jim-jams'; but he had, like thee, the wildest fantasies and imaginings; saw snakes, toads, rats, in his boots, but principally rats; said they pursued him, came to his room, his bed--ach Gott!” “Oh!” said Mr. Clinch, with a sudden return to his firmer self and his native inquiring habits; “then THAT is the fact about Bishop Hatto of the story?” “His enemies made it the subject of a vile slander of an old friend of mine,” said the baron; “and those cursed poets, who believe everything, and then persuade others to do so,--may the Devil fly away with them!--kept it up.” Here were facts quite to Mr. Clinch's sceptical mind. He forgot himself and his surroundings. “And that story of the Drachenfels?” he asked insinuatingly,--“the dragon, you know. Was he too--” The baron grinned. “A boar transformed by the drunken brains of the Bauers of the Siebengebirge. Ach Gott! Ottefried had many a hearty laugh over it; and it did him, as thou knowest, good service with the nervous mother of the silly maiden.” “And the seven sisters of Schonberg?” asked Mr. Clinch persuasively. “'Schonberg! Seven sisters!' What of them?” demanded the baron sharply. “Why, you know,--the maidens who were so coy to their suitors, and--don't you remember?--jumped into the Rhine to avoid them.”