same too; and what was his wonder to find that his beard was grown at least a foot long! "The world,' said he to himself, "is surely turned upside down, or if not, I must be bewitched:" and yet he knew the mountain, as he turned round again, and looked back on its woody heights; and he knew the houses and cottages also, with their little gardens, as he entered the village. All were in the places he had always known them in; and he heard some children, too (as a traveller that passed by was asking his way), call the village by the very same name he had always known it to bear.

Again he shook his head, and went straight through the village to his own cottage. Alas! it looked sadly out of repair; the windows were broken, the door off its hinges, and in the court-yard lay an unknown child, in a ragged dress, playing with a rough, toothless old dog, whom he thought he ought to know, but who snarled and barked in his face when he called to him. He went in at the open doorway; but he found all so dreary and empty, that he staggered out again like a drunken man, and called his wife and children loudly by their names but no one heard, at least no one answered him.

A crowd of women and children soon flocked around the strange-looking man with the long grey beard; and all broke upon him at once with the questions, "Who are you?" "Who is it that you want?" It seemed to him so odd to ask other people, at his own door, after his wife and children, that, in order to get rid of the crowd, he named the first man that came into his

nead. "Hans the blacksmith ?" said he. Most held their tongues and stared; but at last an old woman said, "He went these seven years ago to a place that you will not reach to day." "Fritz the tailor, then ?" "Heaven rest his soul!" said an old beldam upon crutches; "he has lain these ten years in a house that he'll never leave."

Karl Katz looked at the old woman again, and shuddered, as he knew her to be one of his old gossips; but saw she had a strangely altered face. All wish to ask further questions was gone; but at last a young woman made her way through the gaping throng, with a baby in her arms, and a little girl of about three years old clinging to her other hand. All three looked the very image of his own wife. "What is thy name?" asked he, wildly. "Liese!" said she. "And your father's ?"

"Karl Katz! Heaven bless him!" said

she: 66 but, poor man! he is lost and gone. It is now full twenty years since we sought for him day and night on the mountain. His dog and his flock came back, but he never was heard of any more. I was then seven years old."

Poor Karl could hold no longer: "I am Karl Katz, and no other!" said he, as he took the child from his daughter's arms and kissed it over and over again.

All stood gaping, and hardly knowing what to say or think, when old Stropken the schoolmaster hobbled by, and took a long and close look at him. "Karl Katz! Karl Katz!" said he slowly: "why it is Karl Katz, sure enough! There is my own mark upon him; there is the scar over his right eye, that I

gave him

ayself one day with my oak stick." Then several others also cried out, "Yes it is! it is Karl Katz! Welcome neighbour, welcome home!" "But where," said or thought all, "can an honest steady fellow like you have been these twenty years

?"

And now the whole village had flocked around; the children laughed, the dogs barked, and all were glad to see neighbour Karl home alive and well. As to where he had been for the twenty years, that was a part of the story at which Karl shrugged up his shoulders; for he never could very well explain it, and seemed to think the less that was said about it the better. But it was plain enough that what dwelt most on his memory was the noble wine that had tickled his mouth while the knights played their game of nine-pins.

THE BEAR AND THE SKRATTEL.*

"Here's a

ONE Christmas Day, the King of Norway sat in the great hall of his palace, holding a feast. health," said he, "to our brother the King of Denmark! What present shall we send our royal brother, as a pledge of our good-will, this Christmas time?" "Send him, please your majesty," said the Norseman Gunter, who

*Whatever opinion may be formed as to the period from which oral tradition has handed down many of these stories, this tale (which we have translated freely) clearly has an authentic antiquity of, at any rate, the fourteenth century. It exists as a metrical tale, told in the higher German with great spirit, in a MS. at Heidelberg (Codex, No. 341, f. 371), from which extracts and specimens are given in MM. Grimm's preface to the translation of Mr. Croker's Irish Fairy

was the king's chief huntsman, "one of our fine white bears, that his liegemen may show their little ones what sort of kittens we play with." "Well said, Gunter!” cried the king; "but how shall we find a bear that will travel so long a journey willingly, and will know how to behave himself to our worthy brother when he reaches him ?" "Please your majesty," said Gunter, "I have a glorious fellow, as white as snow, that I caught when he was a cub; he will follow me wherever I go, play with my children, stand on his hind legs, and behave himself as well as any gentleman ought to do. He is at your service, and I will myself take him wherchoose."

ever you

So the king was well pleased, and ordered Gunter to set off at once with master Bruin: "Start with the morning's dawn," said he, "and make the best of your way."

The Norseman went home to his house in the forest; and early next morning he waked master Bruin, put the king's collar round his neck, and away they went over rocks and valleys, lakes and seas, the nearest road to the court of the King of Denmark. When they arrived there, the king was away on a journey, and Gunter and his fellow-traveller set out to follow. It was bright weather, the sun shone, and the birds

Legends, given in English by that gentleman in his third volume. The Schrat, Schretel, Skrat, or Skrattel, is one of the numerous names for the domestic spirit or elf, apparently limited to the mischievous species. The MS. is of the fourteenth century, the poem older; probably, MM. Grimm think, of the thirteenth. The malignant spirit Grendel, it will be remembered in Beowulf, carries on his tricks by night, and makes the castle intolerable to the Danish king, who is de red by a strange hero.