hat had been made illustrious
by a talented writer, which abounded in magnificent woods, lofty
mountain-forests and castles, and which was a favorite summer resort
of the neighboring aristocracy.

Who can describe his joyful surprise, when he and his men were quartered
in an old, weather-beaten castle in the middle of a wood, and he learnt
from the house-steward who received him that the owner of the castle was
the husband, and, consequently, also the father of his Viennese ideals.
An hour after he had taken possession of his old-fashioned, but
beautifully furnished, room in a side-wing of the castle, he put on
his full-dress uniform, and throwing his dolman over his shoulders, he
went to pay his respects to the Count and the ladies.

He was received with the greatest cordiality. The Count was delighted to
have a companion when he went out shooting, and the ladies were no less
pleased at having some one to accompany them on their walks in the
forests, or on their rides, so that he felt only half on the earth, and
half in the seventh heaven of Mohammedan bliss. Before supper he had time
to inspect the house more closely, and even to take a sketch of the
large, gloomy building from a favorable point. The ancient seat of the
Counts of W. was really very gloomy; in fact it created a sinister,
uncomfortable feeling. The walls, which were crumbling away here and
there, and which were covered with dark ivy; the round towers, which
harbored jackdaws, owls, and hawks; the AEolian harp, which complained
and sighed and wept in the wind; the stones in the castle yard, which
were overgrown with grass; the cloisters, in which every footstep
re-echoed; the great ancestral portraits which hung on the walls, coated
as it were with dark, mysterious veils by the centuries which had passed
over them--all this recalled to him the legends and fairy tales
of his youth, and he involuntarily thought of the _Sleeping Beauty in the
Wood_, and of _Blue Beard_, of the cruel mistress of the Kynast,[7] and
that aristocratic tigress of the Carpathians, who obtained the unfading
charms of eternal youth by bathing in human blood.

[Footnote 7: A Castle, now a well-preserved ruin, in the Giant Mountains
in N. Germany. The legend is that its mistress, Kunigerude, vowed to
marry nobody except the Knight who should ride round the parapet of the
Castle, and many perished in the attempt. At last one of them succeeded
in performing the feat, but he merely st