r of the restless Neckar, tumbling over her dikes
and dams far below, in the gorge. I got up and went
into the west balcony and saw a wonderful sight.
Away down on the level under the black mass of the Castle,
the town lay, stretched along the river, its intricate
cobweb of streets jeweled with twinkling lights;
there were rows of lights on the bridges; these flung
lances of light upon the water, in the black shadows
of the arches; and away at the extremity of all this
fairy spectacle blinked and glowed a massed multitude
of gas-jets which seemed to cover acres of ground;
it was as if all the diamonds in the world had been spread
out there. I did not know before, that a half-mile
of sextuple railway-tracks could be made such an adornment.

One thinks Heidelberg by day--with its surroundings
--is the last possibility of the beautiful; but when he
sees Heidelberg by night, a fallen Milky Way, with that
glittering railway constellation pinned to the border,
he requires time to consider upon the verdict.

One never tires of poking about in the dense woods that
clothe all these lofty Neckar hills to their beguiling
and impressive charm in any country; but German legends
and fairy tales have given these an added charm.
They have peopled all that region with gnomes, and dwarfs,
and all sorts of mysterious and uncanny creatures.
At the time I am writing of, I had been reading so much
of this literature that sometimes I was not sure but I
was beginning to believe in the gnomes and fairies
as realities.

One afternoon I got lost in the woods about a mile from
the hotel, and presently fell into a train of dreamy thought
about animals which talk, and kobolds, and enchanted folk,
and the rest of the pleasant legendary stuff; and so,
by stimulating my fancy, I finally got to imagining I
glimpsed small flitting shapes here and there down the
columned aisles of the forest. It was a place which was
peculiarly meet for the occasion. It was a pine wood,
with so thick and soft a carpet of brown needles that one's
footfall made no more sound than if he were treading
on wool; the tree-trunks were as round and straight
and smooth as pillars, and stood close together;
they were bare of branches to a point about twenty-five
feet above-ground, and from there upward so thick with
boughs that not a ray of sunlight could pierce through.
The world was bright with sunshine outside, but a deep
and mellow twilight reigned in there, and a