mes from a house where (even as in your own) there are
gathered together some of the waifs of our company at Oakland; a
house--for all its outlandish Gaelic name and distant station--where you
are well-beloved._

_R. L. S._

_Skerryvore, Bournemouth._

BOOK I

PRINCE ERRANT

PRINCE OTTO

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH THE PRINCE DEPARTS ON AN ADVENTURE

You shall seek in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of
Gruenewald. An independent principality, an infinitesimal member of the
German Empire, she played, for several centuries, her part in the
discord of Europe; and, at last, in the ripeness of time and at the
spiriting of several bald diplomatists, vanished like a morning ghost.
Less fortunate than Poland, she left not a regret behind her; and the
very memory of her boundaries has faded.

It was a patch of hilly country covered with thick wood. Many streams
took their beginning in the glens of Gruenewald, turning mills for the
inhabitants. There was one town, Mittwalden, and many brown, wooden
hamlets, climbing roof above roof, along the steep bottom of dells, and
communicating by covered bridges over the larger of the torrents. The
hum of watermills, the splash of running water, the clean odour of pine
sawdust, the sound and smell of the pleasant wind among the innumerable
army of the mountain pines, the dropping fire of huntsmen, the dull
stroke of the wood-axe, intolerable roads, fresh trout for supper in the
clean bare chamber of an inn, and the song of birds and the music of the
village-bells--these were the recollections of the Gruenewald tourist.

North and east the foothills of Gruenewald sank with varying profile
into a vast plain. On these sides many small states bordered with the
principality, Gerolstein, an extinct grand duchy, among the number. On
the south it marched with the comparatively powerful kingdom of Seaboard
Bohemia, celebrated for its flowers and mountain bears, and inhabited by
a people of singular simplicity and tenderness of heart. Several
intermarriages had, in the course of centuries, united the crowned
families of Gruenewald and Maritime Bohemia; and the last Prince of
Gruenewald, whose history I purpose to relate, drew his descent through
Perdita, the only daughter of King Florizel the First of Bohemia. That
these intermarriages had in some degree mitigated the rough, manly stock
of the first Gruenewalds, was an opinion widely held within the borders