ass. Here too were the remains of a once noble garden, and here were
the granaries and the storehouses.

Far below me were the dungeons, with dead men's bones on their dripping
floors; and somewhere in the heart of the peak were secret, unknown
passages, long since closed by tumbling rocks and earth, as darkly
mysterious as the streets in the buried cities of Egypt.

Across the river and below me stood the walled-in town that paid tribute
to the good and bad Rothhoefens in those olden days: a red-tiled,
gloomy city that stood as a monument to long-dead ambitions. A peaceful,
quiet town that had survived its parlous centuries of lust and greed,
and would go on living to the end of time.

So here I sat me down, almost at the top of my fancy, to wonder if it
were not folly as well!

Above me soared huge white-bellied birds, cousins germain to my dreams,
but alas! infinitely more sensible in that they roamed for a more
sustaining nourishment than the so-called food for thought.

I looked backward to the tender years when my valiant young heart kept
pace with a fertile brain in its swiftest flights, and pinched myself
to make sure that this was not all imagination. Was I really living
in a feudal castle with romance shadowing me at every step? Was this
I, the dreamer of twenty years ago? Or was I the last of the Rothhoefens
and not John Bellamy Smart, of Madison Avenue, New York?

The sun shone full upon me as I sat there in my little balcony, but
I liked the dry, warm glare of it. To be perfectly frank, the castle