apartments and towers of his ruinous castle to the bats and the owls, whose profession abroad was not prohibited like that of its luckless lord.
The young knight, Sir Baldwin, beheld with great pain the natural decay of the home of his ancestors. Little space as the whole of his personal property required, it appeared very much as if his castle would only grant him that little for the few warm days of summer, by no means promising him protection against the frost and snow of the ensuing winter. He held a private council with himself, as to what was to be done under such circumstances; but his thoughts always swerved from the task which he had given to his understanding, and amused his imagination with dreams and wishes, which had no sort of connexion with the case in question.
Sir Baldwin’s heart was unfortunately as near to ruin as his paternal castle, with this only difference, that the cause was not from the attacks of age and pitiless enemies, but rather from the repeated assaults of youth and beauty, and against which his means of defence were still more slender. He had seen the daughter of the knight of Aarburg at a tournament, where she had been proclaimed the Queen of Beauty, and presented the prize to the victor. Sir Baldwin’s arm was strengthened tenfold by the sight of her loveliness: he lifted the knights out of their saddles as if they had been men of straw; and his blows fell as if spirits of the air conducted his arm. The fair Bertha was not more shortsighted than the rest of her lovely sex in these particular cases; she saw plainly enough that her
