n deep fluid grey against a sky
still heavy with coming rain. No treasure, indeed, was forthcoming
among the masses of fallen stone. But the tradition was so far
verified, that the bones had rich golden ornaments about them; and for
the minds of some long-remembering people their discovery set at rest
an old query. It had never been precisely known what was become of the
young Duke Carl, who disappeared from the world just a century before,
about the time when a great army passed over those parts, at a
political crisis, one result of which was the final absorption of his
small territory in a neighbouring dominion. Restless, romantic,
eccentric, had he passed on with the victorious host, and taken the
chances of an obscure soldier's life? Certain old letters hinted at a
different ending--love-letters which provided for a secret meeting,
preliminary perhaps to the final departure of the young Duke (who, by
the usage of his realm, could only with extreme difficulty go whither,
or marry whom, he pleased) to whatever worlds he had chosen, not of his
own people. The minds of those still interested in the matter were now
at last made up, the disposition of the remains suggesting to them the
lively picture of a sullen night, the unexpected passing of the great
army, and the two lovers rushing forth wildly at the sudden tumult
outside their cheerful shelter, caught in the dark and trampled out so,
surprised and unseen, among the horses and heavy guns.

Time, at the court of the Grand-duke of Rosenmold, at the beginning of
the eighteenth century might seem to have been standing still almost
since the Middle Age--since the days of the Emperor Charles the Fifth,
at which period, by the marriage of the hereditary Grand-duke with a
princess of the Imperial house, a sudden tide of wealth, flowing
through the grand-ducal exchequer, had left a kind of golden
architectural splendour on the place, always too ample for its
population. The sloping Gothic roofs for carrying off the heavy snows
still indented the sky--a world of tiles, with space uncurtailed for
the awkward gambols of that very German goblin, Hans Klapper, on the
long, slumberous, northern nights. Whole quarryfuls of wrought stone
had been piled along the streets and around the squares, and were now
grown, in truth, like nature's self again, in their rough, time-worn
massiveness, with weeds and wild flowers where their decay accumulated,
blossoming, always the same, beyond pe