"
"That crag!" cried Ebbo. "Little good will it do either of us.
Sire, it is a mere wall of sloping rock, slippery as ice, and with
only a stone or matting of ivy here and there to serve as foothold."
"Where bear can go, man can go," replied the Kaisar.
"Oh, yes! We have been there, craving your pardon, Herr Graf," said
Ebbo, "after a dead chamois that rolled into a cleft, but it is the
worst crag on all the hill, and the frost will make it slippery.
Sire, if you do venture it, I conjure you to take Koppel, and climb
by the rocks from the left, not the right, which looks easiest. The
yellow rock, with a face like a man's, is the safer; but ach, it is
fearful for one who knows not the rocks."
"If I know not the rocks, all true German rocks know me," smiled
Maximilian, to whom the danger seemed to be such a stimulus that he
began to propose the bear-hunt immediately, as an interlude while
waiting for the bride.
However, at that moment, half-a-dozen horsemen were seen coming up
from the ford, by the nearer path, and a forerunner arrived with the
tidings that the Baron of Adlerstein Wildschloss was close behind
with the little Baroness Thekla.
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