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Yet clearer than all these he saw the black, burning eyes
of Sofie Urne; more insistent than aught else her voice
sounded in his spell-bound memory—beautiful and
voluptuously soft, its low notes drawing like white arms, or
rising like a flitting bird that soars and mocks with
wanton trills, while it flees. …
A rustling among the bushes of the rampart below
waked him from his dreams.
“Who goes there!” he cried.
“None but Daniel, Lord Gyldenlöve, Daniel Knopf,”
was the answer, as a little crippled man came out from the
bushes, bowing.
“Ha! Hop-o’-my-Thumb? A thousand plagues, what
are you doing here?”
The man stood looking down at himself sadly.
“Daniel, Daniel!” said Ulrik Frederik, smiling. “You
didn’t come unscathed from the ‘fiery furnace’ last night.
The German brewer must have made too hot a fire for you.”
The cripple began to scramble up the edge of the
rampart. Daniel Knopf, because of his stature called
Hop-o’-my-Thumb, was a wealthy merchant of some and twenty
years, known for his fortune as well as for his sharp tongue
and his skill in fencing. He was boon companion with
the younger nobility, or at least with a certain group of
gallants, le cercle des mourants, consisting chiefly of younger
men about the court. Ulrik Frederik was the life and soul
of this crowd, which, though convivial rather than
intellectual, and notorious rather than beloved, was in fact
admired and envied for its very peccadillos.
Half tutor and half mountebank, Daniel moved among
these men. He did not walk beside them on the public
streets, or in houses of quality, but in the fencing-school,
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