"And I hear nothing more," went on Nele, "for His Sacred Majesty has lain down on a bed and is asleep, and King Philip, arrogant and proud, looks upon him with no love."
Having said so much, Nele was awakened by Katheline. And Claes, pensive, looked at the flame on the hearth lightening up the chimney place.
Ulenspiegel, leaving the landgrave of Hesse, mounted his ass and crossing the town square, met certain wrathful countenances of lords and ladies, but he took no heed of them.
Soon he arrived on the lands of the Duke of Lunebourg, and there fell in with a band of Smaedelyke broeders, jolly Flemings from Sluys who laid aside some money every Saturday so that once a year they could go for a tour in Germany.
They were going on their way singing, in an open cart drawn by a stout horse of Vuerne-Ambacht, that brought them gambolling by the highways and marshy lands of the duchy of Lunebourg. Among them were some that played the fife, the rebeck, the viol, and the bagpipe with a mighty din. Beside the cart there walked at frequent intervals a dikzak playing on the rommel-pot and going afoot in the hope of melting off some of his great belly.
As they were down to their last florin they saw Ulenspiegel come up to them, laden with chiming coin, and went into an inn and paid for his draught. Ulenspiegel gladly accepted. Seeing the while the Smaedelyke broeders were winking as they looked at him and smiling while they poured out his wine for him, he had wind of some trick, went outside, and posted himself at the door to hear their talk. He heard the dikzak saying of him:
"This is the painter of the landgrave who gave him more than a thousand florins for a picture. Let us feast him full with beer and wine, he will pay us back twofold."
Ulenspiegel went to fasten his ass all saddled a thousand paces away at a farmer's, gave two patards to a girl to take charge of it, came back into the chamber of the inn and sat down at the Smaedelyke broeders' table, without uttering a word. They poured out wine for him and paid. Ulenspiegel rattled the landgrave's florins in his satchel, saying that he had just sold his ass to a countryman for seventeen silver daelders.
They travelled on, eating and drinking, playing the fife, the bagpipe, and rommel-pot, and picking up by the way the goodwives they thought comely. In this way they begot foundling children, and beyond all, Ulenspiegel, whose gossip later bore a son which she named Eulenspiegelken, which signifies, in high German, little mirror and owl, and that because she did not understand clearly the meaning of her casual man's name, and also perhaps in memory of the hour when the child was made. And this is the Eulenspiegelken wrongly said to have been born at Krittingen, in the land of Saxony.