less apprehensive of premature interment, and earnestly besought her mother to have the vault under the large round tower converted into a sepulchre, and to place there her unscrewed coffin in an open sarcophagus. The tender mother eagerly promised to comply with the last wish of her darling child, and the pall which covered the coffin was daily moistened with the tears of the desolate survivors.
With a view to cheer the spirits of my aunt and cousin, whose health had visibly suffered from long confinement, I proposed a walk round the park. Avoiding the lower road which led to the sepulchre, I conducted my companions up a steep and well-remembered path, which brought us to a higher level of the castle ruins. Here an agreeable surprise awaited me. When I had played a boy about this ancient pile, all approach to the baron’s hall and the apartments in the tower was impracticable, owing to the entire destruction of the lower staircases; but with a view to better security of person and property in case the not distant tide of war should roll through this secluded district, the baroness had ordered the construction of a staircase terminating in a long corridor, which connected the apartments in the great tower with a fine old baronial hall in tolerable preservation, and accessible only by a small door from the corridor, in consequence of the two grand entrances having been blocked up by large masses of ruin. In this noble apartment every trace of decay had now disappeared. A new flooring of polished oak, new furniture of massive and appropriate design, and new casements of stained glass which admitted a soft and chequered light through the tall and narrow windows, proved the tasteful application of abundant means. In each corner of the hall stood a vast iron stove of antiquated form, with the family arms curiously emblazoned; and on the walls hung some large oil paintings, bearing the stains and wrinkles of two or three centuries; but, having been recently cleaned and varnished, they were still, at some distance from the eye, wonderfully effective. The most striking of these were a wolf hunt, drawn with a display of bone and muscle not unworthy of Rubens; two battle-pieces from the days of chivalry; and the catastrophe of a mortal combat between two mailed knights. In the last, especially, the artist had produced an effect as powerful as it was appropriate and true. Observing how much I was struck by this old picture, my aunt told me that a clue to the subject had been found in an old family chronicle, written by the successive castle-chaplains. The prostrate knight was the valiant Bruno of Rothfels, who was killed in single combat about three hundred years since by Gotthard, then lord of the “Robber’s Tower.” The dying man was unhelmed, and his life-blood, issuing from a wide gash across his throat, had flowed in torrents over his breastplate. The convulsed features and glazed eye-balls of the wounded man told his approaching death, while his clenched right-hand was raised towards heaven, as if imprecating his adverse fortune, and his left was grasping the blood-stained grass. I gazed upon this singular picture until I fancied that I saw the sinewy limbs of the wounded knight quivering with convulsive effort, and almost thought I heard the death-rattle in his throat. When I described to my companions the strange impression which this scene of blood had produced upon my imagination, they acknowledged a similar feeling, and begged me to quit a place which they rarely entered, from an invincible reluctance to encounter this painfully effective picture. Returning to the corridor, I observed at its extremity a low arched iron door, secured with a bar of iron and large padlock. Inquiring to what part of the castle it conducted, my aunt informed me that it was the entrance of an old armoury, which occupied the upper floor of a low square tower containing the castle dungeons; and, being massive and fire-proof, she had availed herself of its security to place there some plate and other valuables, until the Austrian deserters and other marauders, who occasionally committed outrages upon private property, had been taken or dispersed by the police. Above the iron door was suspended another old picture which immediately absorbed my attention. A young and lovely woman, in the garb of a nun, was kneeling in prayer before a shrined image of the Virgin. A beautiful infant boy lay dead and bleeding at her feet—wild despair and delirious agony spoke in
