need not fear," said Glyndon, smiling; "my preceptor is too wise
and too good for such a compact. But here we are, I suppose. A noble
ruin,--a glorious prospect!"

Glyndon paused delightedly, and surveyed the scene before and below with
the eye of a painter. Insensibly, while listening to the bandit, he had
wound up a considerable ascent, and now he was upon a broad ledge of
rock covered with mosses and dwarf shrubs. Between this eminence and
another of equal height, upon which the castle was built, there was a
deep but narrow fissure, overgrown with the most profuse foliage, so
that the eye could not penetrate many yards below the rugged surface of
the abyss; but the profoundness might be well conjectured by the
hoarse, low, monotonous roar of waters unseen that rolled below, and the
subsequent course of which was visible at a distance in a perturbed and
rapid stream that intersected the waste and desolate valleys.

To the left, the prospect seemed almost boundless,--the extreme
clearness of the purple air serving to render distinct the features of
a range of country that a conqueror of old might have deemed in itself
a kingdom. Lonely and desolate as the road which Glyndon had passed that
day had appeared, the landscape now seemed studded with castles, spires,
and villages. Afar off, Naples gleamed whitely in the last rays of the
sun, and the rose-tints of the horizon melted into the azure of her
glorious bay. Yet more remote, and in another part of the prospect,
might be caught, dim and shadowy, and backed by the darkest foliage,
the ruined pillars of the ancient Posidonia. There, in the midst of his
blackened and sterile realms, rose the dismal Mount of Fire; while on
the other hand, winding through variegated plains, to which distance
lent all its magic, glittered many and many a stream by which Etruscan
and Sybarite, Roman and Saracen and Norman had, at intervals of ages,
pitched the invading tent. All the visions of the past--the stormy and
dazzling histories of Southern Italy--rushed over the artist's mind as
he gazed below. And then, slowly turning to look behind, he saw the grey
and mouldering walls of the castle in which he sought the secrets that
were to give to hope in the future a mightier empire than memory owns in
the past. It was one of those baronial fortresses with which Italy was
studded in the earlier middle ages, having but little of the Gothic
grace or grandeur which belongs to the ecclesiastical