forth at her brother's side; and her gentle, maidenly admiration for the handsome stranger ripened into a feeling still warmer and tenderer when she found that the brave knight, with his six feet of stature, the eagle eye, and clustering locks of nut-brown hair, was the one who had saved her brother's throne, and her native country from the iron yoke of a usurper.

And soon a high festival was appointed at Worms in honour of the victor.

Kings and princes were to be there, and Criemhild herself was to be queen and star of the bright assembly.

So that Whitsun morning remained for evermore a glorious memory to Siegfried.

Brave knights, five thousand or more, with their war-horses glittering in trappings of silver and gold, rode down to the lists; but brighter far than they, Criemhild, in the glory of her beauteous maidenhood, led by her mother, Ute, and followed by a bevy of fair girls, only less beautiful than herself, advanced to the canopied daïs prepared for them.

Behind the fair dames went a body-guard of a hundred knights, all sword in hand.

Loud huzzas resounded on all sides, and whispers ran through the crowd that surely Siegfried the valiant and Criemhild the peerless were a prince and princess made for each other.

And then Gernot, her brother, bade Criemhild salute Siegfried with a maiden's kiss, for, but for him, she might even then have been a captive in a stranger's land.

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And upon that Criemhild leant forward, and, with her cheek red with rosy blushes, saluted him with a timid, winning friendliness; and as her balmy breath for a moment lingered upon his brow, it seemed to him as if a new and nobler life had been born within him.

He bent his knee before her with graceful reverence, but she raised him with her soft, white hand, and motioned him to the seat of honour beside her mother and herself.

And then joust and sport went on right merrily, with the sound of sweetest minstrelsy, but there were responsive chords in the heart of this young knight and fair maiden that made a music sweeter far than lute or psaltery, or song of summer birds.

And so, from that bright May morning, the heart of the prince and the princess were knit together in a bond that nothing could ever again unloose, and the two walked one with the other in love's paradise, where the trees are always green and the blossoms seem as though they would never fall.

But by-and-bye news came to King Gunther of the exceeding great beauty of Brunhild, queen of far distant Isenland, and he was at once seized with a great longing to have her for his wife.

It was in vain that Siegfried warned Gunther that he had been to Isenland, and that Brunhild, although of rare beauty, was yet of too fiery a nature to bring peace and content to a husband's home.

Gunther was not to be dissuaded from the enterprise, even though he knew that Brunhild was endowed with more than the strength of any mortal woman, and had the strangest and most wayward habits.

There was peril, too, in becoming a suitor for her hand, for to all such there was this brief condition :

To compete with her in three separate games of hurling the spear, leaping, and throwing the stone; and throwing the stone; if victorious, the prize was the hand of the conquered queen; but if vanquished, the suitor was to lose his own head; and this issue, as Siegfried told Gunther (such was the wondrous strength of Brunhild), had been the fate of many a brave knight.

But men in love seldom listen to reason.

Gunther had the whim upon him, and go he would.

His uncle Hagen, who was prudent, wary, and shrewd in counsel, advised him, if it must be so, to take Siegfried with him; and to this the latter agreed, but upon one condition only, that, should Gunther by his means prove victorious over Brunhild, Criemhild should be given him to wife as soon as he returned to Worms.

Gunther willingly made the required promise, and Siegfried immediately undertook the whole management of the enterprise.

And first there was to be no great retinue marching to Isenland, only two knights, Hagen and Daukwart, should accompany the king and himself to Brunhild's court.

And so Criemhild, her heart beating with a mixed feeling of

hope and sorrow, bade farewell to her hero,-sorrow to lose, even for a brief space, him who had become the joy of her life, and yet exultant hope, for she knew that her lover would return victorious, and that henceforth their two lives would be linked in a holy and indissoluble union.

So the little band departed; Siegfried, as may be supposed, carried his magic treasures with him.

In twenty days the voyage to Isenland was accomplished, and the little bark which bore Siegfried and his companions across the Northern Sea, was safely brought to shore.

With light hearts the four men leapt upon the beach, and there right in front of them stood Brunhild's magnificent palace.

It was built of marble, green as grass, yet withal of a dazzling brilliancy, and from the windows of it, the princes could see fair women looking down upon them with curious eyes; and in a snow-white robe, who seemed to Gunther the stateliest of them all, he heard from Siegfried was none other than Brunhild herself.

one,

Now Siegfried, for reasons very clear to himself, had made an agreement with Gunther that, though a free prince and heir to the kingdom of the Netherlands, yet during the time of his stay in Isenland he should appear only as the vassal of the Burgundian monarch, and as such he held the stirrup for him as he mounted his horse on the beach to ride up to the palace gate.

were.

Now Brunhild felt very curious to know who the strangers

One indeed looked like the prince whom she had

known in bye-gone days; the other evidently was a mighty king. So she summoned her maidens from the windows, and they all put on their most splendid apparel, to give fitting reception to the unexpected guests.

Very magnificent was the audience-chamber into which the strangers were ushered. The walls sparkled with porphyry and jasper, while the vaulted ceiling admitted light through