a matvellously beautiful face, such helpless blue eyes.  Afterward I remembered who and where it had been.  God guard me from sinning against my own child, but that was exactly the way the young girl looked who they—­it was farther back in the past than you can remember—­burned here for a witch, as the halberdiers and monks led her to the place of execution.  Susanne Schindler—­that was her name —­was the daughter of a respectable notary’s clerk, who was obliged to wander about the world a great deal, and perished in Hungary just as she reached womanhood.  Her mother had died when she was born, and an old woman had taken care of her out of friendship.  People called the lass ‘beautiful Susel,’ and she was wonderfully charming.  Pink and white, like the maiden in the fairy tale, and with glittering golden hair just like my Wawerl’s.  The old woman with whom she lived—­her aunt or some other relative—­had long practised the healing of all sorts of infirmities, and when a young Spanish count, who had come here with the Emperor Charles to the Reichstag in the year ’31, fell under his horse in leaping a ditch, his limbs were injured so that he could not use them.  As he did not recover under the care of the Knights of St. John, who first nursed him, he went to the herb doctress, and she took charge of him, and cured him, too, although the skill of the most famous doctors and surgeons had failed to help him.

“But, to make amends, Satan, who probably had the largest share in the miracle, visited him with the sorest evil, for ‘beautiful Susel,’ who was the old woman’s assistant, had so bewitched the young count that he not only fell in love with her, but actually desired to make her his wife.

“Then all the noble relatives at home interfered.  The Holy Inquisition commanded the investigation of the case, and sent a stern vicar general to direct the proceedings of the Dominicans, who had seized the temptress.  Then it came to light that ‘beautiful Susel’ had bewitched the luckless young count and robbed him of reason by her wicked arts.

“The old woman, whom they had also examined, escaped her just punishment because she died of the plague, which was raging here at that time, but ‘beautiful Susel’ was burned, and I looked on while it was done.

“When the Dominicans had led her to the stake, she turned toward the people who had flocked here from all quarters.  Many doubtless pitied her on account of her marvellous beauty, and because the devil had given her the mask of the most touching kindness of heart; but she gazed directly into my face with her large, blue eyes as I stood close by, and for years I saw the witch’s look distinctly before me.  Yet what do we not at last forget?  And now it must happen that what reminded me of her again is my own innocent child!  Wawerl just looked into my eyes as if ’beautiful Susel’ had risen from her grave.  It was not long, yet it seemed as if she shrank in terror from me, her own clear father.  She gazed up at me in helpless despair, as if she feared God and the world.