"Why not?"
"Because you must wait twelve years for an olive tree, twenty for a cork, and forty before the bark is first rate. Give me New England, where, with nothing under heavens but his rifle and narrow axe, a man can raise his bread on a burn the first year, knock up a log hut, and have his meat for the killing."
"And wood enough for a camp fire," said Ned, laughing.
[CHAPTER VI.]
THE POWER OF ASSOCIATION.
As the boys returned by the same road, which presented no new objects to excite their curiosity, much less time was consumed in measuring the same distance; and they ascended the eminence upon which the castle was situated, and stood before its principal entrance long before night.
It was one of the few old feudal strongholds still remaining in France that had not been suffered to go to decay by its possessors. It had been the property of a grand seignior (derived from his ancestors), who, having built a modern chateau near it, with extensive stables and other out-buildings, kept the old castle in complete repair, till sacked by a mob during the reign of terror.
It had evidently been a place of great strength, but occupying so much space that a large garrison would be required to man its exterior fortifications. It was beautifully situated upon a noble swell of land, falling away in natural terraces to the stream upon whose banks were clustered the dwellings of the peasants. The hand of violence had swept away all but the relics of its former magnificence and beauty. The axe had levelled the vast groves and long avenues of oak, chestnut, beech, and massive pines,—which had for ages delighted the eye and gratified the taste, and beneath whose hoary limbs generations had lived and died,—except one clump of large pines, at some distance in the rear of the fortress.
Everything without the walls that would burn had been consumed by fire, while the tall chimney of the chateau, and other buildings standing amid heaps of rubbish, the wild weeds springing from the joints of the hearth-stones, imparted a peculiarly desolate appearance to the scene.
Gunpowder had been freely used to obtain an entrance into the fortress, and afterwards to destroy it; but such was the enormous thickness of the walls that but comparatively little impression had been produced upon them, although single apartments had been blown up and whole floors had fallen, the pillars which supported them having been mined. Entire floors, supported at one end by the beams, which still remained in the walls, and a few pillars, while the remaining portion lay upon heaps of rubbish, bricks, mortar, fragments of clothes, domestic utensils, curved frames, broken china and glass ware of the rarest patterns and the richest colors, presented an inclined plane, up which the boys clambered to the apartments above, passing through chambers once the abode of luxury, but from whose walls the rich tapestry hung in tatters, exposed to sun and wind, that found free entrance through shattered casements and demolished doors. The boys gazed with wonder upon the relics of a magnificence of which they had before no conception.