fleeing flood seized and carried off below, but from on high the
moonbeams fell in fresh skeins. You might have thought that by the pond a
nixie157 was sitting, and with one hand was pouring forth a fountain from
a bottomless urn, while with the other she cast sportively into the water
handfuls of enchanted gold that she took from her apron.

Farther on, the brook, running out from the ravine, wound over the plain,
and became quiet, but one could see that it still flowed, for along its
moving, shimmering surface the quivering moonlight twinkled. As the fair
serpent of Zmudz called _giwojtos_, though, lying amid the heather, it
seems to slumber, still crawls along, for by turns it shows silver and
golden, until it suddenly vanishes from the eye in the moss or ferns; so
the brook wound and hid among the alders, which showed black on the far
horizon, raising their light forms, indistinct to the eye, like spirits
half seen and half in mist.

Between the ponds in the ravine a mill was hidden. As an old guardian who
is spying on two lovers and has heard their talk together, grows angry,
storms, shakes his head and hands and stutters out threats against them;
so that mill suddenly shook its brow overgrown with moss and twirled
around its many-fingered fist: hardly had it begun to clatter and stir its
sharp-toothed jaws, when at the same moment it deafened the love talk of
the ponds, and awoke the Count.

The Count, seeing that Thaddeus had approached so near the spot where he
had halted under arms, shouted: "To arms! Seize him!" The jockeys rushed
forward, and, before Thaddeus could comprehend what was happening to him,
they had already caught him; they ran towards the mansion and poured into
the yard. The mansion awoke, the dogs barked, the watchmen shouted, the
Judge rushed out half clad; he saw the armed throng and thought that they
were robbers until he recognised the Count. "What does this mean?" he
asked. The Count flashed his sword over him, but, when he saw that he was
unarmed, his fury grew cool.

"Soplica," he said, "ancestral enemy of my family, to-day I punish thee
for ancient and for fresh offences; to-day thou wilt render me an account
for the seizure of my fortune before I avenge me for the insult to my
honour!"

But the Judge crossed himself and cried:--

"In the name of the Father and of the Son! foh! My Lord the Count, are you
a robber? By God, does this befit your birth, your education, and the
statio