his place, with one or two silent serving people, a
sudden rising of the wind altered, as it might seem, in a few dark,
tempestuous hours, the entire world around him. The strong wind
changed not again for fourteen days, and its effect was a permanent
one; so that people might have fancied that an enemy had indeed cut the
dykes somewhere--a pin-hole enough to wreck the ship of Holland, or at
least this portion of it, which underwent an inundation of the sea the
like of which had not occurred in that province for half a century.
Only, when the body of Sebastian was found, apparently not long after
death, a child lay asleep, swaddled warmly in his heavy furs, in an
upper room of the old tower, to which the tide was almost risen; though
the building still stood firmly, and still with the means of life in
plenty. And it was in the saving of this child, with a great effort,
as certain circumstances seemed to indicate, that Sebastian had lost
his life.

His parents were come to seek him, believing him bent on
self-destruction, and were almost glad to find him thus. A learned
physician, moreover, endeavoured to comfort his mother by [115]
remarking that in any case he must certainly have died ere many years
were passed, slowly, perhaps painfully, of a disease then coming into
the world; disease begotten by the fogs of that country--waters, he
observed, not in their place, "above the firmament"--on people grown
somewhat over-delicate in their nature by the effects of modern luxury.

IV. DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD

[119] One stormy season about the beginning of the present century, a
great tree came down among certain moss-covered ridges of old masonry
which break the surface of the Rosenmold heath, exposing, together with
its roots, the remains of two persons. Whether the bodies (male and
female, said German bone-science) had been purposely buried there was
questionable. They seemed rather to have been hidden away by the
accident, whatever it was, which had caused death--crushed, perhaps,
under what had been the low wall of a garden--being much distorted, and
lying, though neatly enough discovered by the upheaval of the soil, in
great confusion. People's attention was the more attracted to the
incident because popular fancy had long run upon a tradition of buried
treasures, golden treasures, in or about the antiquated ruin which the
garden boundary enclosed; the roofless shell of a small but
solidly-built stone ho