I bring ye all but transient woe;
Your souls my scythe may never mow,
These shall to God ascend!'
[ALL SOULS' DAY.]
BY B. S. INGEMANN.
It was a stormy autumn evening; the last yellow leaves of the beech-trees were whirling through the forest near Soröe, and the usually calm lake was lashed into wild waves like those of the open sea.
'Does Italian Franz reside in this wood?' asked a clear, manly voice from the road, as Count Otto stopped his grey steed close to a peasant's cottage, and knocked at the little window with his riding-whip.
'You can't lose your way,' replied an old woman, opening the window a very little. 'If you take the path on the left, alongside of the lake, the first house you will come to is where the under-ranger lives.'
The young count thanked her and proceeded on. When he turned into the path by the left, where the moon shone full through the trees, and cast its silver rays upon the agitated lake, his horse shied, and sprang to one side; at the same moment the count's eyes fell upon the trunk of a hollow oak-tree by the side of the road, against which a figure appeared to be leaning. It was that of a man in the garb of a hunter he saw; his rifle lay at his feet; his horse, bound to the old tree, stood by his side, and, as a moonbeam fell on his face, lighting up his features, the young count felt, for the first time in his life, a strange sensation of terror--it was as if he beheld before him a well-known countenance, but terribly changed and distorted. He gave himself no time to examine into the cause of this fear, a feeling which he had never before experienced in any of his numerous journeys, not even when he had fallen in with highwaymen and robbers, with whom he had often had desperate encounters, but without reasoning one moment with himself, or taking time to think why he felt such sudden dread, he plunged his spurs into his horse's sides, and galloped on as fast as possible. The solitary hunter leaning against the decayed tree was Italian Franz. This name had been bestowed on him on account of his having been in the employment of a noble family, with whom he had resided for several years in Italy, and who, as a reward for his faithful services to them, had obtained for him the rangership he now held near Soröe. He was born in this part of the country, where his father had been the owner of a mill. But his long residence in a southern climate had tanned his originally fair northern complexion, and imparted a swarthy, sunburnt hue to his cheek, while his light hair had also become darker in these remote lands. He was a man somewhere about forty years of age, and when he was in good spirits, or in a gay humour, he might have passed for much younger, especially when he indulged in the vivacity of manners he had acquired in the South. But when his fierce and gloomy fits came over him, he looked so old, and also so wild and formidable, that no one would willingly have met him alone in the woods. He would often remain whole nights in the forest, with his gun over his shoulder, whistling or singing Italian airs in the moonlight, especially when autumnal gales whirled the leaves around him, and the lake was dark and agitated.
While he thus wandered in the deep woods or by the lonely lake, his only child, the beautiful Giuliana, who was born in Italy, sat, a solitary being in the forest lodge, and gazed at the charming pictures of Capri, Torrento, and Ischia, and many other lovely spots, views of which her father had brought with him from her enchanting native land, and which she in vain tried to recall to memory, for she had left it at so early an age that she retained but a very faint recollection of it, and to her its beauties were almost ideal. She did not remember her mother at all; her father could never be induced to speak of her; and from the time she first began to notice what was going on around her, she had always felt inclined to cry when other children spoke of their mothers, because she had none herself.