"The gracious lordship is wrong," said public opinion, by the voice
of old Bauer Ulrich, the sacrificer of the horse's head. "Heaven
forfend that evil befall him and that mare in the course of the
year."
And the buzz of voices concurred in telling of the recusant pigs who
had never developed into sausages, the sheep who had only escaped to
be eaten by wolves, the mule whose bones had been found at the bottom
of an abyss.
Old Ursel was seriously concerned, and would have laid hold on her
young master to remonstrate, but a fresh notion had arisen--Would the
gracious Freiherr set a-rolling the wheel, which was already being
lighted in the fire, and was to conclude the festivities by being
propelled down the hill--figuring, only that no one present knew it,
the sun's declension from his solstitial height? Eberhard made no
objection; and Christina, in her shelter by the cave, felt no little
dismay at being left alone there, and moreover had a strange, weird
feeling at the wild, uncanny ceremony he was engaged in, not knowing
indeed that it was sun-worship, but afraid that it could be no other
than unholy sorcery.
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