another. These struggling
with big burdens; those but basking in the sun. So many granaries stored
with food; so many cells where the little things sleep, and eat, and
love; the corner where lie their little white bones. This hive is
larger, the next smaller. This nest lies on the sand, and another under
the stones. This was built but yesterday, while that was fashioned ages
ago, some say even before the swallows came; who knows?

Nor will there be found herein folk-lore or story.

Every valley where lie homesteads has its song. I will tell you the
plot; you can turn it into verse and set it to music of your own.

There lived a lass, and there came a lad, who loved and rode away.

It is a monotonous song, written in many languages; for the young man
seems to have been a mighty traveller. Here in sentimental Germany they
remember him well. So also the dwellers of the Blue Alsatian Mountains
remember his coming among them; while, if my memory serves me truly, he
likewise visited the Banks of Allan Water. A veritable Wandering Jew is
he; for still the foolish girls listen, so they say, to the dying away of
his hoof-beats.

In this land of many ruins, that long while ago were voice-filled homes,
linger many legends; and here again, giving you the essentials, I leave
you to cook the dish for yourself. Take a human heart or two, assorted;
a bundle of human passions--there are not many of them, half a dozen at
the most; season with a mixture of good and evil; flavour the whole with
the sauce of death, and serve up where and when you will. "The Saint's
Cell," "The Haunted Keep," "The Dungeon Grave," "The Lover's Leap"--call
it what you will, the stew's the same.

Lastly, in this book there will be no scenery. This is not laziness on
my part; it is self-control. Nothing is easier to write than scenery;
nothing more difficult and unnecessary to read. When Gibbon had to trust
to travellers' tales for a description of the Hellespont, and the Rhine
was chiefly familiar to English students through the medium of _Caesar's
Commentaries_, it behoved every globe-trotter, for whatever distance, to
describe to the best of his ability the things that he had seen. Dr.
Johnson, familiar with little else than the view down Fleet Street, could
read the description of a Yorkshire moor with pleasure and with profit.
To a cockney who had never seen higher ground than the Hog's Back in
Surrey, an account of Snowdon must have ap