The Invisible Lodge

In my opinion, what made the Head-forester Von Knör so incredibly sharp-set upon chess was, that from one year's end to the other, he had nothing to do but to be, once during that time, the guest, the Santa Hermandad or Holy Brotherhood and the Dispenser of Bulls to the rangers. The reader can surely never have heard of an amateur with so extravagant a passion as his. The least he could do was to send for all his servants to the village of Strehpcnik, (where one gains as much immunity from taxation by chess as a nobleman does by a Saxon Diet,) in order that he might (though in a different sense from that of Cato) have as many opponents as servants. For another instance, he and a nobleman of Upper Yssel in Zwoll spent more postal money in writing than in riding, inasmuch as they played chess at a distance of 250 miles, not with fingers, but with pens. Still another fact may satisfy the reader, viz., that he and Kempele's Automaton Chess-player corresponded with each other, and that the fellow-lodger and adjutant of the wooden Moslem, Herr von Kempele, once in my presence wrote back to him from Hay street in Leipsic, in the name of the Mussulman, that the latter castled.