Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-13.pdf/10



HE supreme delight we take in being racked, tortured and suspended over chasms by the fickle tenure of a rotten plank is one of the most unselfish traits of human nature. For my part, I have never been so happy as when held, by the strong power of imagination, right over the depths of a mediæval oubliette, at the bottom of which the roaring of the sea or of a brace of gormandizing lions was distinctly audible.The first question asked by Paul Flemming of the baron of Hohenfels, when at Heidelberg, was one about that tradition of the castle according to which Louis le Débonnaire was frightened by an apparition of Satan and the Virgin into delivering up his brother Frederick to the two Black Knights representing the Vehm-Gericht. "Ha! that is grand,"