Next day happened a thing which even still recurs to me in nightmare.

When I came down to breakfast, released from arrest by special intervention of the Baron, Carl was not there. Gretel said he had caught a cold from his wetting, and was confined to his room.

Late in the afternoon Eloise and I were in the great library. We had watched the King depart, the Graf von Bismarck, cigar in mouth, accompanying him. Carriage after carriage, containing guests, had driven away; and Eloise and I were pressing our noses against the panes of the window looking at the park, and speculating on Carl and the condition of his cold, when the door opened, and Gretel looked in.

"Oh, there you are, children!" cried Gretel. "Well, and what are you doing with yourselves?"

"Nothing," yawned Eloise, turning from the window. "We have played all our games, haven't we, Toto?"

"Well you are sure to be getting into mischief if you are left to yourselves," said the woman. "Come with me, and I will show you a fine game. It is now a quarter to five. We will go up to the turret and see the Man in Armour strike the hour."

"Hurrah!" cried I, and Eloise skipped. It was the desire of both our hearts to see the mysterious Man in Armour close, and watch him strike the bell.

"Fetch your hats, then, for it is windy in the tower," said Gretel. And off we went to fetch them.

She led us through a door off the corridor, and up circular stone stairs that seemed to have no end, till we reached the room where the machinery was placed that drove the clock and struck the bell.

A ladder from here led us to the topmost chamber, where the iron man with the iron hammer stood before the iron bell.

This chamber was open to the four winds, and gave a splendid view of the mountains and the forest, and the lands lying towards Friedrichsdorff and beyond.

But little cared I for the scenery. I was examining the Man in Armour. He was taller than a real man, and his head was one huge mass of iron cast in the form of a morion. Clauss of Innsbruck had made him, and he struck me with a creepy sensation that was half fear. He stood with his huge hammer half raised; and the knowledge that at the hour he would wheel on his pivot and hit the bell vested him with an uncanny suggestion of life, even though one knew he was dead and made of iron.

"He will not strike for ten minutes," said Gretel. "Gott! how cold it is here, and how windy! Come, let us play a game of blind-man's buff to keep ourselves warm."

My small handkerchief was brought into requisition, and Gretel blinded me, pinning the handkerchief to my kÉpi. "And now," said Gretel, "I will bind Eloise, and you can try to catch me."

Then we played.

If you had been standing below you might have heard our laughter. I had just missed Eloise, when I was myself seized from behind by the waist, and Gretel's voice cried: "Now I've caught you!"

Even as she spoke a deep rumbling came from the machinery-room below. "Now I've caught you. Now I've caught you!" cried Gretel's voice, that seemed choking with laughter.

Something like a mighty bird swept past my forehead, tearing the kÉpi from my head and the handkerchief from my eyes, and flinging me on the floor with the wind of its passage.

BOOM!

The great hammer of the Man in Armour had struck its first stroke, and with a thunderous, heart-shattering sound. The great hammer had passed my head so close that another half inch would have meant death.

BOOM!

I lay paralysed, looking up at the iron figure swinging to its work. He had nearly killed me, and I knew it. Again the hammer flew towards the bell.

BOOM!

The tower rocked, and the sound roared through the openings, and the joints of the iron figure groaned and the arms upflew once more.

BOOM!

And once again, urged by the might of the hammer-man, tremendous, apocalyptic, and sinister the voice of the great bell burst over the woods.

BOOM!

The woodmen in the forests of the Taunus corded their bundles and prepared for home, for five o'clock had struck from the Schloss Lichtenberg.

At the first stroke, Eloise had sat down on the floor, screaming with fright at the noise. She was sitting there still, with her eyes bandaged, when the sound died away.

"What an escape!" cried Gretel, who was white and shaking. "Little boy, had I not plucked you away, the hammer would have killed you! It would have killed you had it not been for me!"

But in my heart I knew better than that.

* * * * *

That night I told Joubert of the thing. He said Gretel was a fool.

"Joubert," I said, "I am afraid of this house, and I am afraid of Gretel; and I want to say my prayers again, please, for I was not thinking when I said them just now."

I said them again; and Heaven knows I needed them more than any prince trapped in the ogre's castle of a fairy tale.