The Sword That Kept the Turkey's Blood

Around Saint John's tomb there hang on three sides twenty-seven silver lamps and one of gold; of the golden one this is told. In the days when students still carried swords and rapiers, a youth from Saxony was studying in Prague. He was on his way to his lessons when in the passage he saw a cook about to kill a turkey. The merry student struck off the turkey's head with his sword and, without wiping the blood from the weapon, thrust it back into the scabbard and hurried on to school. There, in the long corridor, two students had just fallen out over something and set upon each other, until one of them fell — and the guilty one fled. Before that student could collect himself, the watch came and arrested him as the culprit; in vain did he protest that the real offender had run away, and the dead man could not bear witness for him. He had already been brought to execution when a priest resembling Saint John of Nepomuk stepped up to the scaffold and covered the condemned man with his cloak — and at that both priest and student vanished.