suicide, as he
considered it, with sighs and mutterings and ominous shakings of the
head.

You know the condition of the castle now,--nothing but scorched walls
and crumbling piles of fallen masonry. Well, at the time I tell you of,
the keep was still partially preserved. It was finally burned out only a
few years ago by some wicked boys who came over from Jenbach to have a
good time. But when the ghost hunters came, though the two lower floors
had fallen into the crypt, the third floor remained. The peasants said
it _could_ not fall, but that it would stay until the Day of Judgment,
because it was in the room above that the wicked Count Albert sat
watching the flames destroy the great castle and his imprisoned guests,
and where he finally hung himself in a suit of armor that had belonged
to his mediaeval ancestor, the first Count Kropfsberg.

No one dared touch him, and so he hung there for twelve years, and all
the time venturesome boys and daring men used to creep up the turret
steps and stare awfully through the chinks in the door at that ghostly
mass of steel that held within itself the body of a murderer and
suicide, slowly returning to the dust from which it was made. Finally it
disappeared, none knew whither, and for another dozen years the room
stood empty but for the old furniture and the rotting hangings.

So, when the two men climbed the stairway to the haunted room, they
found a very different state of things from what exists now. The room
was absolutely as it was left the night Count Albert burned the castle,
except that all trace of the suspended suit of armor and its ghastly
contents had vanished.

No one had dared to cross the threshold, and I suppose that for forty
years no living thing had entered that dreadful room.

On one side stood a vast canopied bed of black wood, the damask hangings
of which were covered with mould and mildew. All the clothing of the bed
was in perfect order, and on it lay a book, open, and face downward. The
only other furniture in the room consisted of several old chairs, a
carved oak chest, and a big inlaid table covered with books and papers,
and on one corner two or three bottles with dark solid sediment at the
bottom, and a glass, also dark with the dregs of wine that had been
poured out almost half a century before. The tapestry on the walls was
green with mould, but hardly torn or otherwise defaced, for although the
heavy dust of forty years lay on everything the