ned down from the knoll to rejoin their comrades, the sun
dipped and disappeared, and the woods fell instantly into the gravity
and greyness of the early night.

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH THE PRINCE PLAYS HAROUN-AL-RASCHID

The night fell upon the Prince while he was threading green tracks in
the lower valleys of the wood; and though the stars came out overhead
and displayed the interminable order of the pine-tree pyramids, regular
and dark like cypresses, their light was of small service to a traveller
in such lonely paths, and from thenceforth he rode at random. The
austere face of nature, the uncertain issue of his course, the open sky
and the free air, delighted him like wine; and the hoarse chafing of a
river on his left sounded in his ears agreeably.

It was past eight at night before his toil was rewarded and he issued at
last out of the forest on the firm white high-road. It lay downhill
before him with a sweeping eastward trend, faintly bright between the
thickets; and Otto paused and gazed upon it. So it ran, league after
league, still joining others, to the farthest ends of Europe, there
skirting the sea-surge, here gleaming in the lights of cities; and the
innumerable army of tramps and travellers moved upon it in all lands as
by a common impulse, and were now in all places drawing near to the inn
door and the night's rest. The pictures swarmed and vanished in his
brain; a surge of temptation, a beat of all his blood, went over him, to
set spur to the mare and to go on into the unknown for ever. And then it
passed away; hunger and fatigue, and that habit of middling actions
which we call common sense, resumed their empire; and in that changed
mood his eye lighted upon two bright windows on his left hand, between
the road and river.

He turned off by a by-road, and in a few minutes he was knocking with
his whip on the door of a large farmhouse, and a chorus of dogs from the
farmyard were making angry answer. A very tall, old, white-headed man
came, shading a candle, at the summons. He had been of great strength in
his time, and of a handsome countenance; but now he was fallen away, his
teeth were quite gone, and his voice when he spoke was broken and
falsetto.

"You will pardon me," said Otto. "I am a traveller and have entirely
lost my way."

"Sir," said the old man, in a very stately, shaky manner, "you are at
the River Farm, and I am Killian Gottesheim, at your disposal. We are
here, sir, at ab