He is chary of words and salutatious, does not talk about the weather, and when he has business in a shop, he walks squarely in (castle move), lays a finger on the article he desires, and names his price. If that is not acceptable, he retires,-by the castle move again.

Of course Altpoppendorf has its chess legend, which may be said to be composed of fact and fancy in about equal proportions. Here is the legend as I read it in that old volume of which the pages are memories and traditions, and the book-markers the centuries.

There was much important bustle about the doors of the Altpoppendorf hostelry of the Golden Eagle one spring afternoon, for the Lady Abbess of 'Quedlinburg had alighted from her litter at the inn door and was enjoying a short repose in the great guestchamber. Things have quieted down again by now, for that was some three hundred years ago.

The Abbess was a great lady. She was of high, most transparent, birth, for her brother was no other than the Herzog Adalbert von Gilzum, of whom most people have probably never heard, though he was a very considerable person in his way for all that. He could not have been otherwise; for the Abbey of Quedlinburg was rich and powerful, and the Lady Abbess had sway over the rock of Quedlinburg with the Abbey and Castle perched on the top of it, over the town crouching humbly at its feet, and over the wide fertile plain that rock and Castle commanded. And there can be no doubt that the Herzog Adalbert von Gilzum, who could acquire such an appanage for his sister in the teeth of the fiercest competition, was a potentate of great power and influence.

You must not, however, be too quick to envy her Grace the Lady Abbess Dorothea von Gilzum her transparent

birth and her proud position. As she reclined in the great guest-chamber, with her eyes closed and her white hands folded over the Book of Hours on her lap, she was thinking more of the cares of office than of its splendor, -as empty of comfort these latter as the brilliants encrusted in the covers of the devotional volume. Of all her anxieties, the one that recurred most persistently to her mind was that connected with the Graf Albrecht von Regenstein, the most unruly of her vassals, who exercised the honorable profession of Raubritter, GentlemanBrigand as you might say,-and from his almost impregnable aerie harried her tenants, intercepted her revenues, and laid violent hands on the merchants journeying under her protection between Magdeburg and Halberstadt and her town of Quedlinburg.

You

may still see the nest of this mountain eagle or vulture, the Graf von Regenstein, his palace hewn out of the hard sandstone, and the deep well in which the captive merchants sat waiting for death or remittances. A Biergartensweet horticultural development!-now graces the spot, and where horrors were done or planned, the stout Herr and Housfrau play the eternal "Skat," unmindful of the past. But the Lady Abbess had no such lighter associations of the Regenstein rock to cheer her reflections, into which there entered rather a vision of her gallows of Quedlinburg with a Gentleman-Brigand dangling thereon. And yet, alas! he was such a presentable man, this wicked, troublesome Graf Albrecht von Regenstein!

You have probably conceived of the Lady Abbess as an aged and venerable person, weaned by time if not by grace from the vanities of earth and royal courts, and stopping up with a tardy zeal the devotional gaps in a long life of frivolity or high politics. If so, you have formed an entirely wrong impres

sion; for, let me tell you, there are Lady Abbesses and Lady Abbesses, and Dorothea von Gilzum was still young, still very fair, and, with that, gentle and womanly. Her youth was, of course, not against her, for the faculty of command is hereditary; and even if youth is a fault, the Lady Abbess made atonement in due course. For she lived to a good age: you can see her portrait as a handsome old dame in the Installation Room of the Castle of Quedlinburg, where the lines of the marvellous parquet radiate out from the chair of state to figure the gracious influence that emanated from its occupant. It brings this great lady somewhat nearer to me to know that she painted in oils as shockingly as I should do, had I the mind. In a room, which a glorious Dutch oven renders worthy of more artistic things, they still show one of her productions. In this picture Delilah,-and is it not touching to find the simple young Abbess illustrating in oils the life of an extremely improper person?-Delilah in fifteenth-century costume is represented as shearing most conscientiously the head of a very anæmic Samson. And despite its glaring errors of design and execution, the picture is, for the memory of the reverend young ártist, pathetic and lovable.

Some hours before sunset the Lady Abbess decided to order her litter and continue her journey, for she had still a matter of four leagues to cover before she reached her Castle of Quedlinburg, and even with an armed escort the roads were none too safe, more especially in the night and in the neighborhood of a turbulent Albrecht von Regenstein. The Abbess had just put her hand to her silver bell when one of her ladies entered and asked if her Grace would receive his Excellency the Domherr Heinsius of Halberstadt. Now the Bishop of Halberstadt was a mighty prince, temporal and spiritual,

in the days before the power of Rome was upset by one Dr. Martin Luther, and the Cathedral Canons-the Domherren-were powers too. It would never do to deny his Excellency an audience; and, moreover, Dorothea von Gilzum had a pretty girlish curiosity to see him, for he had but newly come to the cathedral, and his piety and learning were much spoken of. So she intimated that he should be introduced, meaning to set out on her way in no later than half an hour, Dr. Heinsius or no Dr. Heinsius.

The Domherr entered, and the Lady Abbess had all she could do not to cry out aloud. For she had expected an aged, somewhat decrepid, churchman, bowed with the weight of years and learning, and here was a tall young priest with the face of an angel-and a commanding face-so that she, mistress of life and death in her district of Quedlinburg, lady paramount of so many vassals, spiritual and temporal, was silent, and almost confused before this young Canon of Halberstadt.

Dr. Heinsius explained that, being on his way back afoot to Halberstadt from a village where he had had business, he had heard that her Grace was lying at the Golden Eagle of Altpoppendorf, and had ventured, journeystained as he was, to turn aside from the field paths to pay his respects to her. The Lady Abbess invited the Canon to a seat, and they spoke on and on of many things till the sun was near the horizon. And the Abbess had not yet ordered her litter, for the voice of the young Domherr was like the chiming across the fields of the tenor bell of Halberstadt, and his face was the face of an angel.

Then the eyes of Dr. Heinsius chanced on the Abbess's chessboard, without which she never stirred,-a marvel of silver and ebony, with ivory pieces, that had come overland from China, and had taken two years in

the coming. And the Domherr confessing that he had deeply studied and loved the game, as the highest and purest of all intellectual exercises, they set out the board. The Lady Abbess was renowned for her skill far beyond the limits of her suzerainty, but here she had met an adversary who taxed all her powers. The sun sank below the horizon, and still the mules of the Abbess drowsed in their stalls.

On and on they played, the young Abbess and the young Domherr. The candles that were brought in and set by them enveloped in their golden light the two noble, serious faces and the chessboard and chessmen of marvellous workmanship, and threw restless shadows back up the dark length of the great guest-chamber. All around was the silence of night. When at last one of the candles flickered out in its sconce, the Lady Abbess rose with a gesture of amazement and went to the window. She drew back the curtain. and the clean light of a spring sunrise flooded the room, turning the golden flame of the candles to a sickly fire.

And there was no one but herself in the great guest-chamber!

Only perhaps the outline, fading like a mist on the air, of a tall standing form and an angelic face.

The Abbess rang for her ladies, who came all red-eyed and peevish with sleeplessness. To her inquiries they gave answers that filled her with astonishment. For they assured her that no Domherr, or Herr indeed of any

kind, had come to visit her; that,

bringing candles to the guest-chamber, they had found her Grace engaged with her chessboard, as if studying some problem; that she had seemed not to hear them when they had hinted at evening bread; and that so they had left her Grace to her meditations. The host, too, knew nothing of the visit of Dr. Heinsius. In great perplexity the Lady Abbess ordered her litter and set

out for home. And when she was come near half way, one rode up to tell her that the Graf Albrecht von Regenstein had set an ambush in her road on the previous evening, determined to take her and hold her to ransom. He had waited till sunrise, when, supposing that she had wind of his scheme, and had gone by another path, he had ridden back to his rock of Regenstein with his army of cutthroats.

Then the Abbess turned off the direct way and rode to Halberstadt. There she called upon the Lord Bishop, and begged him-it was a matter of idle curiosity: she had heard so much talk-to present the new Domherr, Dr. Heinsius, to her. My lord in some astonishment sent for the canon, assuring her Grace with a smile that her expectation might be disappointed. When Dr. Heinsius came, the Lady Abbess found him to be a little, old, bent churchman, with very bad manners and not too cleanly. After he was gone, she told my lord her vision of the night, for a vision it certainly was. And it was evident to both of them that her journey had been hindered by a heavenly messenger, the holy St. Ambrose in all probability, for he was her Grace's patron saint.

The Abbess presented to the host of the Golden Eagle of Altpoppendorf her curious chessboard and chessmen, and they are still to be seen on the occasion of the quinquennial chess tournaments, held for three hundred years in their honor, in the great guest-chamber of the hostelry where her Grace had the miraculous vision. At one end of the room hangs a large portrait of her Grace, another of her favors bestowed on the Golden Eagle.

As for the audacious GentlemanBrigand of Regenstein, the Lady Abbess let the trumpet be sounded twice before each of the hostelries where her captains lay. Her captains led the

vassals of Quedlinburg against the Regenstein rock and took it, for all its boasted impregnability. They carried the Graf Albrecht to Quedlinburg, and there they built a great wooden cage for him up in the top stories of the Rathaus, where you may still see it. In this cage the Graf von Regenstein sat gnashing his teeth, and trying to cut his way out with a small knife: they show you the notches in the hard oak. But after twenty months the Lady Abbess let the Graf go free,for indeed he was a most personable man!-under an oath which he made no weak show of keeping.

It would never do for the chief of the Altpoppendorfians, his Worship the Schultheiss, the representative of the village that has such a legend, not to be a leading chess power; and Herr Schmalz, who was in office twenty years ago from this date, was in this respect quite up to the level of his position. He was a small, meagre, lighthaired man, of indefinite complexion, with a little Vandyck beard and a scissor-hacked flaxen moustache: he wore gold spectacles, and he walked on his toes with an elastic action. This action was the minor cause of his nickname of "Der Springer," which not only means what it seems to the English eye to mean, but also in chess parlance "The Knight." In its metaphorical signification this nickname was no honorable one, for it implied that the Worshipful Schultheiss had advanced through life by the knight's move-a tricky if artistic one. When Knight Schmalz "sprang," his neighbors never

knew exactly where he would land or over what lines he would travel: the benevolent or malicious ends of his conduct could not be calculated. The former were discounted by a series of preliminary exasperations; the reverse were rendered doubly obnoxious by the memory of the kindly sentiments that had preceded them. The fact of it was that Herr Schmalz had a crease in his character, and he would have been a happier man if nature, instead of this moral endowment, had fitted him out with a club-foot or a Cyrano de Bergerac nose. Herr Schmalz had made and inherited money, and had returned to his native Altpoppendorf, where he had accepted the office of Schultheiss on condition that he was not to be disturbed in it for life. This condition was readily granted, as there is no fevered competition for a post of which the chief duties are the conscientious and rectilineal affixing to a wall of governmental and other notices, the equitable distribution of small fines, and the personal inspection of the village open drain; the only emolument, a fairly free hand with postage-stamps and official note-paper. So Herr Schmalz was Worshipful Schultheiss for life, and not very much was asked of him, as you have seen; but Altpoppendorf demanded of him that he should know all about chess. This Herr Schmalz did-there was no gainsaying it, and his Worship the Schultheiss was the embodied law, the walking book of reference, in the great room of the "Silver Board," to which the Golden Eagle had changed its name after the vision of the Lady Abbess of Quedlinburg, and its very gratifying result for the village hostelry.

Frau Schmalz was a lady who very early in her life had been pushed to the margin of the board of Life, and did not seem very likely to get back into play again. Not very likely and not the least anxious. Providence