aroused at midnight, and saw three armed men standing by his bedside, he
received a shock that did more to awaken him than the grip of alien
hands on his shoulders. During that night ride in the boat he said
nothing but thought much. He had heard his mother plead for him without
for a moment delaying his departure. She, evidently, was powerless.
There was then in the land a force superior to that of the Throne.
Something that had been said quieted his mother's fears, for at last she
allowed him to go without further protest, but weeping a little, and
embracing him much. There was no roughness or rudeness on the part of
those who conveyed him down the river Main, and finally along the Rhine
to Ehrenfels, but rather the utmost courtesy and deference, yet Roland
remained silent throughout the long journey, agitated by this new,
invisible, irresistible sovereignty animated with the will and power to
do what it liked with him.

At the Castle of Ehrenfels he found awaiting him no rigorous
imprisonment. He was treated as a welcome guest of an invisible host. It
was his conversations with the garrulous custodian, who was a shrewd
observer of the passing show, that gradually awakened the young Prince
to some familiarity with the affairs of the country. He learned now in
what a deplorable state the capital stood, through the ever-increasing
exactions of the robber Barons along the Rhine. He asked his instructor
why the merchants did not send their goods by some other route, which
was a very natural query, but was told there existed no other route. A
great forest extended for the most part between Frankfort and Cologne,
and through the wilderness were no roads, for even those constructed by
the Romans had been allowed to fall into decay; overgrown with trees,
Nature thus destroying the neglected handiwork of man; the forest
reclaiming its own.