“So, my friend, you think upon the wine, eh?  Come and spend an hour with me and you shall taste it.”  As he spoke a warm, sweet wine-scent rose like incense about him, making the peasant’s brain reel with delight.  He could not but follow the little man, tripping under the vines, thrusting his way through thorn-hedges and over crumbling walls, till he came to a flight of ancient steps, streaked grey and green with moss, leading down to a weather-stained cellar-door.  The door opened into dusky vaults and from a niche in the wall the little cooper took a candle and a huge bowl.  Then on he went over the moist floor until there rose before them in the candlelight, darker than the gloom about it, a gigantic tun.  In a crooning murmur the cooper began to tell of his possessions.  He called the vaults his realm, the tuns his dearly loved subjects—­for, as the peasant gazed, he saw a long procession of tuns stretching away into the darkness.  He shouted with mad delight at the sight, he clapped his hands and smacked his lips in anticipation, he declared the tuns glittered like pure gold.  At this the cooper laughed and pointed out that the wine had fashioned its own casks, gleaming crusts, from which the ancient wood had fallen away long ago.

And next he filled the huge bowl with deep glowing wine and drank to the peasant, whose hands ached to hold the bowl and lift it to his lips.  At last, with a courtly bow, the cooper put it into his hands, and then the rustic emptied the bowl in one draught and drew a deep sigh of satisfaction.

In rapture he sang the praises of the wine, but the cooper assured him that there was better to come.  Again he tasted, and again the little man led on from cask to cask.  Then, mad with delight, the peasant sang aloud, but the song broke into wild howling; he danced about the tuns, then fell to embracing them, stroking and kissing them, babbling love-words to the dusky fragrant wine.  And still the cooper led on to the next cask, still he filled the bowl, and still the peasant drank, till at last in very joy tears ran down his face, and before his eyes the tuns danced round him in a giddy whirl; then slumber fell upon him and he sank down to sleep in the gloom.

When he awoke next morning his body lay stretched in a muddy ditch, his lips pressed to clammy moss.  Stumbling to his feet, he looked around for the door of the wine vault, for the flight of steps leading down to that realm of delight, but though he searched long and carefully, yet never again could he find it, nor did his eyes see the little cooper with his wine-stained leathern apron and his rubicund face.

CHAPTER VI—­WORMS AND THE NIBELUNGENLIED

Worms is celebrated as the locality of the Nibelungenlied and the epic of Walthar of Aquitaine.  But it has other claims to fame.  Before entering on the consideration of Germany’s greatest epic we will recount several of the lesser legends of the locality.