shooting on the hills, and likely, as we
learned, to be away all night.

We had an excellent meal: fish from the river, fowl from the
poultry-yard--we heard the clucking of the doomed hen, and the indignant
remonstrances of her companions--a capital omelette, and country cheese
and butter. With these comfortable things we had a bottle of honest wine
of unknown vintage, but palatable and generous; and when the meal was
over we sat and smoked in a kind of animal ease begotten of the past
labor and present comfort. The storm lashed the panes, and though the
time of year was but late August, and the hour not beyond six of the
afternoon, it was so dark we could scarce see across the road. Yet every
flash of lightning that hung with its blue, quivering light in the skies
for two or three seconds at a time showed the fortress to either of us
who chose to look out of window; and tired and bodily contented as I
was, I never saw its gloomy form thus gloomily illuminated; but my first
feeling on beholding it came back to me, and with it the guide's phrase:
"The end of your journey, gentlemen!" The Austrian government would
have seen to that if any merest guess of our purpose had occurred to the
stupidest of its officials. I speak of Austria as she was, not as she
is. She has learned something in the universal struggle for freedom
which has shaken Europe since I first opened my eyes upon the world. But
in those days--I speak it calmly, and with something, at least I hope,
of the judgment which should belong to old age--Austria was a power to
be loathed and warred against by all good men, a stronghold of tyranny
and cruelty, a dark land within whose darkness dark deeds were done, a
country where the oppressed found no helper. I am heaping up words in
vain, which is a thing outside my habits. Every student of history knows
what Austria was at that time, and there are thousands still living who
are old enough to remember.

We went to bed early that night in spite of thunder and lightning, rain
and wind, and slept as we deserved to do after the heavy marching of
the day. When I got up in the morning the mountains were smiling in a
sun-bath, the river wound shining through fields of delightful green,
and the fortress, ugly as it was in itself, took from its surroundings,
and helped to give them back again a picturesque and pleasing look. The
feeling I had first had in respect to it never came back again in its
first force; and when I