perilous, often also, with pikes and discontents when he swooped from the
tall over-frowning Castle of the Wolfsberg upon their booths and
guilderies--"to scotch the pride of rascaldom," as he told them when they
complained. In these days my father was little at home, his business
keeping him abroad all the day about the castle-yard, at secret
examinations in the Hall of Judgment, or in mysterious vaults in the
deepest parts of the castle, where the walls are eighteen feet thick, and
from which not a groan can penetrate to the outside while the Duke
Casimir's judgment was being done upon the poor bodies and souls of men
and women his prisoners.

In the court-yard, too, the dogs, fierce russet-tan blood-hounds,
ravined for their fearsome food. And in these days there was plenty of
it, too, so that they were yelling and clamoring all day, and most of
the night, for that which it made me sweat to think of. And beneath the
rebellious city cowered and muttered, while the burghers and their
wives shivered in their beds as the howling of Duke Casimir's
blood-hounds came fitfully down the wind, and Duke Casimir's guards
clashed arms under their windows.

So this night I looked down contentedly enough from my perched eyrie on
the top of the Red Tower. It had been snowing a little earlier in the
evening, and the brief blast had swept the sky clean, so that even the
brightest stars seemed sunken and waterlogged in the white floods of
moonlight. Under my hand lay the city. Even the feet of the watch made no
clatter on the pavements. The fresh-fallen snow masked the sound. The
kennels of the blood-hounds were silent, for their dreadful tenants were
abroad that night on the Duke's work.

Yet, sitting up there on the Wolfsberg, it seemed to me that I could