That morning, at nine o’clock, as they were going to breakfast, the Rowski’s trumpets sounded.  Clad in complete armor, and mounted on his enormous piebald charger, he came out of his pavilion, and rode slowly up and down in front of the castle.  He was ready there to meet a champion.

Three times each day did the odious trumpet sound the same notes of defiance.  Thrice daily did the steel-clad Rowski come forth challenging the combat.  The first day passed, and there was no answer to his summons.  The second day came and went, but no champion had risen to defend.  The taunt of his shrill clarion remained without answer; and the sun went down upon the wretchedest father and daughter in all the land of Christendom.

The trumpets sounded an hour after sunrise, an hour after noon, and an hour before sunset.  The third day came, but with it brought no hope.  The first and second summons met no response.  At five o’clock the old Prince called his daughter and blessed her.  “I go to meet this Rowski,” said he.  “It may be we shall meet no more, my Helen—­my child—­the innocent cause of all this grief.  If I shall fall to-night the Rowski’s victim, ’twill be that life is nothing without honor.”  And so saying, he put into her hands a dagger, and bade her sheathe it in her own breast so soon as the terrible champion had carried the castle by storm.

This Helen most faithfully promised to do; and her aged father retired to his armory, and donned his ancient war-worn corselet.  It had borne the shock of a thousand lances ere this, but it was now so tight as almost to choke the knightly wearer.

The last trumpet sounded—­tantara! tantara!—­its shrill call rang over the wide plains, and the wide plains gave back no answer.  Again!—­but when its notes died away, there was only a mournful, an awful silence.  “Farewell, my child,” said the Prince, bulkily lifting himself into his battle-saddle.  “Remember the dagger.  Hark! the trumpet sounds for the third time.  Open, warders!  Sound, trumpeters! and good St. Bendigo guard the right.”

But Puffendorff, the trumpeter, had not leisure to lift the trumpet to his lips:  when, hark! from without there came another note of another clarion!—­a distant note at first, then swelling fuller.  Presently, in brilliant variations, the full rich notes of the “Huntsman’s Chorus” came clearly over the breeze; and a thousand voices of the crowd gazing over the gate exclaimed, “A champion! a champion!”

And, indeed, a champion had come.  Issuing from the forest came a knight and squire:  the knight gracefully cantering an elegant cream-colored Arabian of prodigious power—­the squire mounted on an unpretending gray cob; which, nevertheless, was an animal of considerable strength and sinew.  It was the squire who blew the trumpet, through the bars of his helmet; the knight’s visor was completely down.  A small prince’s coronet of gold, from which rose three pink ostrich-feathers, marked