drawing near to the fire. "It slipped over my lips, I couldn't
help it," said Francis; then he lit the great candles and opened the
door of the adjoining room, which was very snugly fitted up for our
reception. In a short time a table was spread for us before the fire,
and the old man served us with several well-dressed dishes, which
were followed by a brimming bowl of punch, prepared in true Northern
style,--a very acceptable sight to two weary travellers like my uncle
and myself. My uncle then, tired with his journey, went to bed as soon
as he had finished supper; but my spirits were too much excited by the
novelty and strangeness of the place, as well as by the punch, for me
to think of sleep. Meanwhile, Francis cleared the table, stirred up the
fire, and bowing and scraping politely, left me to myself.

Now I sat alone in the lofty spacious _Rittersaal_ or Knight's Hall.
The snow-flakes had ceased to beat against the lattice, and the storm
had ceased to whistle; the sky was clear, and the bright full moon
shone in through the wide oriel-windows, illuminating with magical
effect all the dark corners of the curious room into which the dim
light of my candles and the fire could not penetrate. As one often
finds in old castles, the walls and ceiling of the hall were ornamented
in a peculiar antique fashion, the former with fantastic paintings and
carvings, gilded and coloured in gorgeous tints, the latter with heavy
wainscoting. Standing out conspicuously from the great pictures, which
represented for the most part wild bloody scenes in bear-hunts and
wolf-hunts, were the heads of men and animals carved in wood and joined
on to the painted bodies, so that the whole, especially in the
flickering light of the fire and the soft beams of the moon, had an
effect as if all were alive and instinct with terrible reality. Between
these pictures reliefs of knights had been inserted, of life size,
walking along in hunting costume; probably they were the ancestors of
the family who had delighted in the chase. Everything, both in the
paintings and in the carved work, bore the dingy hue of extreme old
age; so much the more conspicuous therefore was the bright bare place
on that one of the walls through which were two doors leading into
adjoining apartments. I soon concluded that there too there must have
been a door, that had been bricked up later; and hence it was that this
new part of the wall, which had neither been painted like t