The Waverley novels, by Sir Walter Scott, complete in 12 vol., printed from the latest English ed., embracing the author's last corrections, prefaces & notes.

110 WAVERLEY NOVELS.
dered as filling up the measure of his presumption. A thousand voitces
exclaimed, " We will have no cinder-sifter mingle in our games of chivalry."
Irritated to frenzy, Martin drew his sword and hewed down the herald, who,
in compliance with the general outcry, opposed his entry into the lists. An
hundred swords were unsheathed to avenge what was in those days regarded
as a crime only inferior to sacrilege, or regicide. Waldeck, after defending
himself like a lion, was seized, tried on the spot by the judges of the lists,
and condemned, as the appropriate punishment for breaking the peace of
his sovereign, and violating the sacred person of a herald-at-arnms, to have
his right hand struck from his body, to be ignominiously deprived of the
honour of nobility, of which he was unworthy, and to be expelled from the
city. When he had been stripped of his arms, and sustained the mutilation
imposed by this severe sentence, the unhappy victim of ambition was abandoned to the rabble, who followed him with threats and outcries levelled
alternately against the necromancer and oppressor, which at length ended
in violence. Htis brothers (for his retinue were fled and dispersed) at length
succeeded in rescuingf him from the hands of the populace, when, satiated
with cruelty, they had left him half dead through loss of blood, and through
the outrages he had sustained. They were not permitted, such was the ingenious cruelty of their enemies, to make use of any other means of removing
him, excepting such a collier's cart as they had themselves formerly used,
in which they deposited their brother on a truss of straw, scarcely expecting to reach any place of shelter ere death should release him from his
misery.
When the Waldecks, journeying in this miserable manner, had approached
the verge of their native country, in a hollow way, between two mountains,
they perceived a figure advancing towards them, which at first sight seemed
to be an aged man. But as he approached, his limbs and stature increased,
the cloak fell'from his shoulders, his pilgrim's staff was changed into an
uprooted pine-tree, and the gigantic figure of the Harz demon passed before
them in his terrors. When he came opposite to the cart which contained
the miserable Waldeck, his huge features dilated into a grin of unutterable
contempt and malignity, as he asked the sufferer, " How like you the fire
MY coals have kindled?" The power of motion, which terror suspended in
his two brothers, seemed to be restored to Martin by the energy of his
courage. He raised himself on the cart, bent his brows, and, clenching his
fist, shook it at the spectre with a ghastly look of hate and defiance. The
goblin vanished with his usual tremendous and explosive laugh, and left
Waldeck exhausted with this effort of expiring nature.
The terrified brethren turned their vehicle toward the towers of a convent,
which arose in a wood of pine-trees beside the road. They were charitably
received by a bare-footed and long-bearded capuchin, and Martin survived
only to complete the first confession he had made since the day of his
sudden prosperity, and to receive absolution from the very priest whom,
precisely on that day three years, he had assisted to pelt out of the hamlet
of Morgenbrodt. The three years of precarious prosperity were supposed
to have a mysterious correspondence with the number of his visits to the
spectral fire upon the hill.
The body of Martin Waldeck was interred in the convent where he expired, in which his brothers, having assumed the habit of the order, lived
and died in the performance of acts of charity and devotion. His lands,
to which no one asserted any claim, lay waste until they were reassumed
by.the emperor as a lapsed fief, and the ruins of the castle which Waldeck
had called by his own name, are still shunned by the miner and forester as
haunted by evil spirits. Thus were the miseries attendant upon wealth,
hastily attained and ill employed, exemplified in the fortunes of Martin
W~aldeck.