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 also a deep silence so profound that I seemed to hear my own
breathings.

When I had stood ten