the knight’s only daughter, celebrated throughout all Germany by the name of “the Beautiful Bertha.”—Princes, counts, and knights, came from the four quarters of the earth to admire her and humbly solicit her love—but she was not to be pleased so easily: this knight she found too dull, that too presuming, and a third was splenetic—Frenchmen, Britons, and Italians, all shared the same fate. “He who shall gain this bride,” quoth gossip Rumour, “will be fortune’s greatest favourite; for besides the enchanting beauty with which nature has endowed her, and the immense wealth with which fortune has loaded her father, there is an invaluable casket of jewels—an ancient property of the house of Aarburg—which she, as the last of her family, will receive at her nuptials for her bridal ornaments.”
At the distance of a few arrow-flights from the Castle of Aarburg stood an ancient ruin, which the late owner, Sir Heerwart, had left as the sole inheritance of his only son Baldwin. Before the period when the emperor Maximilian introduced the spreading plant of Roman law into the German soil, and whilst every knight could protect his property with spear and sword, the good Sir Heerwart was not the poorest among those of his own rank; for he was brave in battle, and made great profit by booty and ransom: but now, when the knightly spear was obliged to bend before the goose-quill, and the emperor, during public peace, laid heavy fines upon all private feuds against the property of others, he could not get on quite so well as usual. Year after year he was obliged to cede
