r the river towards the mountains, until my voice would rouse him
from his musings. This visionary play of memory lasted but a moment,
and then an incontrollable desire came over me to look upon that face
once more, and abundantly to make up for what I had lost so long.

It was early in the afternoon; I hoped that I should not mistake the
road, and never doubted but that at this autumn season, I should find
my friend at home; he was an eager sportsman, and had spoken far
oftener of the trees, than of the persons he had known from childhood.

I may have followed this ravine for about an hour, when it suddenly
occurred to me as strange, that the road should be so neglected and
overgrown; it was evident that no sort of carriage could possibly have
passed this way for years. The foliage of past autumns lay mouldering
in deep crevices;--here and there, a fragment of rock, or rotten
branch, had been hurled from the edge by the winter storms; only in the
firmest parts of the ground, were occasional tracks of human passage. I
sent my doubts to sleep, with the supposition, that long before this,
some other and more level road, must have been made between the castle
and the plain. And yet, on entering the ravine, I had certainly
ascertained that no nearer way was possible, from the little
manufacturing town I had left behind. At the summit of the pass, where
half a dozen neglected paths diverged, I stopped, in real perplexity. I
climbed up a wide armed beech-tree, and looked all round me.

A deep circular hollow lay before me, almost like a lake, filled with
lovely bright green waves of densest foliage. It was a vast forest of
old beech-trees. Just in the centre rose the turrets of the castle,
over which the wilderness seemed to close.

It was like a fairy tale, to see the spires and weather-cocks
glittering in the bright autumn sun; as in those stories of sunken
castles, which shew their pinnacles on some clear day, peeping from the
hidden depths of water. There was not a sound of human life; the
woodpecker tapped monotonously against the trees;--a careless deer ran
past me, with more surprise than terror;--while swarms of audacious
squirrels, among the branches, were aiming at the intruder, with the
empty husks of beechnuts.

I was on the point of giving it up, when, with a sharper look at the
enchanted castle, I saw a thin thread of smoke, to inform me that it
could not exclusively be harbouring hobgoblins.

That the own