tilled their poor patches of ground, wrenching from the hard
soil barely enough to keep body and soul together. Among those
vile hovels played the little children like foxes about their
dens, their wild, fierce eyes peering out from under a mat of
tangled yellow hair.

Beyond these squalid huts lay the rushing, foaming river,
spanned by a high, rude, stone bridge where the road from the
castle crossed it, and beyond the river stretched the great,
black forest, within whose gloomy depths the savage wild beasts
made their lair, and where in winter time the howling wolves
coursed their flying prey across the moonlit snow and under the
net-work of the black shadows from the naked boughs above.

The watchman in the cold, windy bartizan or watch-tower that
clung to the gray walls above the castle gateway, looked from
his narrow window, where the wind piped and hummed, across the
tree-tops that rolled in endless billows of green, over hill and
over valley to the blue and distant slope of the Keiserberg,
where, on the mountain side, glimmered far away the walls of
Castle Trutz-Drachen.

Within the massive stone walls through which the gaping gateway
led, three great cheerless brick buildings, so forbidding that
even the yellow sunlight could not light them into brightness,
looked down, with row upon row of windows, upon three sides of
the bleak, stone courtyard. Back of and above them clustered a
jumble of other buildings, tower and turret, one high-peaked
roof overtopping another.