mile distant Nature suddenly changes. As if by
the wave of a magician's wand you are transported into the midst of
thriving fields, fertile arable land, and meadows. You see, too, the
large and prosperous village, with the land-steward's spacious
dwelling-house; and at the angle of a pleasant thicket of alders you
may observe the foundations of a large castle, which one of the former
proprietors had intended to erect. His successors, however, living on
their property in Courland, left the building in its unfinished state;
nor would Freiherr[1] Roderick von R---- proceed with the structure
when he again took up his residence on the ancestral estate, since the
lonely old castle was more suitable to his temperament, which was
morose and averse to human society. He had its ruinous walls repaired
as well as circumstances would admit, and then shut himself up
within them along with a cross-grained house-steward and a slender
establishment of servants.

He was seldom seen in the village, but on the other hand he often
walked and rode along the sea-beach; and people claimed to have heard
him from a distance, talking to the waves and listening to the rolling
and hissing of the surf, as though he could hear the answering voice of
the spirit of the sea. Upon the topmost summit of the watch-tower he
had a sort of study fitted up and supplied with telescopes--with a
complete set of astronomical apparatus, in fact. Thence during the
daytime he frequently watched the ships sailing past on the distant
horizon like white-winged sea-gulls; and there he spent the starlight
nights engaged in astronomical, or, as some professed to know, with
astrological labours, in which the old house-steward assisted him. At
any rate the rumour was current during his own lifetime that he was
devoted to the occult sciences or the so-called Black Art, and that he
had been driven out of Courland in consequence of the failure of an
experiment by which an august princely house had been most seriously
offended. The slightest allusion to his residence in Courland filled
him with horror; but for all the troubles which had there unhinged the
tenor of his life he held his predecessors entirely to blame, in that
they had wickedly deserted the home of their ancestors. In order to
fetter, for the future, at least the head of the family to the
ancestral castle, he converted it into a property of entail. The
sovereign was the more willing to ratify this arrangement sin