Old Stoffel was afraid of these towers himself. Not of the ghosts, he said with a laugh, but of the stones that might fall from their crumbling walls. Still the people in Tausens knew better; they did not believe him; they were sure he had been frightened by the ghost there, and would not confess it for fear of getting no men to work for him. Old Stoffel was a wild daring fellow who feared neither God nor the devil. Indeed, many people thought he had made a bargain with the Evil One. He never went to church, but frequented the tavern, where he drank up all his gains. He made his children work for him: he never did anything himself, and although he was a very old man, he spent his time in going from tavern to tavern until he died. One morning he was found dead on the road from Tausens to the castle,--his corpse was perfectly blue. The postmaster remembered well that Dr. Putzer said that the old man had had a stroke, but no one in Tausens believed it, for the doctor was as great a blasphemer and tippler and as bad a Christian then as he is at present. Stoffel's time was up, and the devil had wrung his neck, which was why his corpse was blue,--every Christian knew that. After the old man's death the Count could find no tenant for the castle, for no one could be found to pay rent for it. Stoffel's sons, although they could work, had not sense enough to know how to manage, and the daughters were not much better. They stayed all together at the castle, however, although Count Menotti never got much rent out of them. He tried to sell the estate, and offered it for almost a nominal price, but who wanted to buy a haunted old nest on a misty mountain in the Tyrol? A couple of years had passed, when one day, how long since the postmaster could not exactly say, but nearly thirty years he should think, a grand gentleman with his beautiful wife had driven to Tausens. They stopped at the old Oberwieser's, the postmaster's father's,--the inn had not then been named the Post. The stranger was Herr von Heydeck, who had bought the castle of Count Menotti and had come to inspect it. Hansel was then a young fellow about eighteen years old, and he had been bidden by his father to show the strangers up to the castle. He did not like to do it, but there was no joking with the old Oberwieser, and so he obeyed. On the way he told Herr von Heydeck and the handsome lady-wife about the ghosts in the castle, and how the devil had wrung old Stoffel's neck when his time was up, and they both laughed,--the lady laughed most. She often paused on the way up and looked around. She thought the country lovely, and when they had reached the summit of the rocks and saw the view from the balcony of the main building of the castle, she was enchanted. The whole castle must be repaired and newly furnished, she said, and then it would be a delightful place to invite one's friends to in summer-time.