n architecture,
might be privileged to visit the interior, of the beauty of which he had
heard much. The fact that I was making my rounds with a retinue of two
attendants was accepted as such a guaranty of my own good character and
importance that I was admitted with the utmost courtesy to stately and
interesting interiors, from the portals of which I should otherwise have
been driven with suspicion and ignominy.

Having seen what I could at Vicenza, I spent a night at Treviso, whence,
having got up before sunrise, I drove in a weeping morning to the
wonderful Villa Maser, about twenty miles away--the villa whose halls
and chambers are gorgeous from end to end with the frescoes of Paul
Veronese, and whose tutelary gods look out over the vastness of the
Lombard plains, though their view is slightly impeded by the bulk of a
Renaissance church. That evening I ensconced myself in an ill-lit train,
which, passing close to Venice and crossing the Austrian frontier,
brought me and my servant to a strange little medieval town, where we
slept in an arcaded hostelry which would not have seemed strange to
Erasmus. I halted here because in the neighboring wonderland is, as I
knew from descriptions, a castle more fantastic than any fancy of
Albert Duerer's--the high-perched castle of Hoch-Osterwitz. I spent next
day in exploring it. It outdid all my dreams. Reached by a corkscrew
road which, passing through strange gatehouses, winds upward round an
isolated hill resembling a pine-clad sugar loaf, the castle covers the
summit. It suggested Tennyson's line to me: "Pricked with incredible
pinnacles into heaven." Not so large or terrific as St. Hilarion, it
inflicts perhaps on the imagination a yet acuter twinge, for St.
Hilarion belongs to an age so wholly dissociated from our own that the
distance between them is beyond the reach of measurement.
Hoch-Osterwitz, on the other hand, though in consequence of its
inconvenient position its owners no longer lived in it, was still not
wholly derelict. Its roofs were watertight; a portion of it was occupied
by a caretaker; two of its halls were full of neglected armor; and some
fragments of ancient furniture survived in a cell-like bedroom which
were sufficient for the baron when he came--as from time to time he
did--to see the caretaker, a sort of steward, on business. The life of a
distant age still smoldered within the ancient walls like a fire not
quite extinguished, and the nerves of the