ght, a home for homeless wanderers on the face of Europe,
while Schloss Matzen was a synonym for all that was gracious and kindly
and beautiful in life. The days moved on in a golden round of riding and
driving and shooting: down to Landl and Thiersee for chamois, across the
river to the magic Achensee, up the Zillerthal, across the Schmerner
Joch, even to the railway station at Steinach. And in the evenings after
the late dinners in the upper hall where the sleepy hounds leaned
against our chairs looking at us with suppliant eyes, in the evenings
when the fire was dying away in the hooded fireplace in the library,
stories. Stories, and legends, and fairy tales, while the stiff old
portraits changed countenance constantly under the flickering firelight,
and the sound of the drifting Inn came softly across the meadows far
below.

If ever I tell the Story of Schloss Matzen, then will be the time to
paint the too inadequate picture of this fair oasis in the desert of
travel and tourists and hotels; but just now it is Kropfsberg the Silent
that is of greater importance, for it was only in Matzen that the story
was told by Fraeulein E----, the gold-haired niece of Frau von C----, one
hot evening in July, when we were sitting in the great west window of
the drawing-room after a long ride up the Stallenthal. All the windows
were open to catch the faint wind, and we had sat for a long time
watching the Otzethaler Alps turn rose-color over distant Innsbrueck,
then deepen to violet as the sun went down and the white mists rose
slowly until Lichtwer and Laneck and Kropfsberg rose like craggy islands
in a silver sea.

And this is the story as Fraeulein E---- told it to us,--the Story of
Kropfsberg Keep.

* * * * *

A great many years ago, soon after my grandfather died, and Matzen came
to us, when I was a little girl, and so young that I remember nothing
of the affair except as something dreadful that frightened me very much,
two young men who had studied painting with my grandfather came down to
Brixleg from Munich, partly to paint, and partly to amuse
themselves,--"ghost-hunting" as they said, for they were very sensible
young men and prided themselves on it, laughing at all kinds of
"superstition," and particularly at that form which believed in ghosts
and feared them. They had never seen a real ghost, you know, and they
belonged to a certain set of people who believed nothing they had not
see