even these signs of human life in its most brutalised phase, ceased wholly. There was only the rapid ring of his mare's hoofs, given back by a thousand hollow echoes, as he swept down the ravine, with high precipitous walk of rock rising on either side, while the river thundered and foamed beside him, and the trees closing above-head made it well-nigh dark as night, though beyond, the summits of the Hungarian range were still lit by the last rays of the sun gleaming golden on eternal snows. Sitting down in his saddle, with his eyes glancing, rapid and unerring as a soldier's, on either side where the shelving rocks sloped upward in the gloom, Erceldoune dashed along the defile at a pace such as the blood horses of the desert reach—the surging of the torrent at his side, the winds rising loud and stormy among the black pine-boughs above, the intense stillness and solitude around, that are only felt in the depths of a forest or the hush of a mountain-side.
These were what he loved in his life: these nights and days of loneliness, of action, of freedom, alone with all that was wildest and grandest in nature, under no law but the setting and rising of the sun, riding onward, without check or pause, a fresh horse ready saddled when the jaded one
