friends could not think of going a hunting, but stuck close to the social fire side, spending thus the day amid amusing conversations; their stock of entertaining narratives seemed to be inexhaustible.
The gloominess of the weather gave their conversation a serious turn: They began to discourse on the calamities of war, of the dangers they had formerly undergone, and of many distresses and sufferings they had experienced in the earlier part of their lives; as night advanced the tempest grew more furious, the flame in the chimney was wasted to and fro, and began to die away by degrees. Father Herrman fed it with dry wood, poked the cinders out, and it began again to blaze aloft.
"Brother," now said Hellfried, who, meanwhile had been filling his pipe, "brother, dost thou believe in apparitions? Dost thou believe in spirits?"
Herrman
