GEORGE SAND’S NOVELS

Handy Library Edition

THE SNOW MAN

The Race on the Ice

THE
SNOW MAN

BY

GEORGE SAND

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN
AND COMPANY

CONTENTS

Copyright, 1870,
By Roberts Brothers.

Copyright, 1898,
By Little, Brown, and Company.

Printers
S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U. S. A.

THE SNOW MAN.

WILL the reader be kind enough to enter with us at once into the subject of this story, as he does when, in the theatre, the curtain rises upon a situation which the actors proceed to explain.

In the same way, we beg him to go with us straightway into the heart of the locality which is the scene of this narrative;—yet there is this difference, that in the theatre the curtain seldom rises upon an empty stage; while in the present instance, the narrator and the reader are to be for a few moments alone together.

The place into which we are thus conveyed, is sufficiently strange and not particularly agreeable. It is a four-sided room, at first sight apparently a regular square, but one of its angles is really more acute than the others, as we observe the moment we notice the dark-colored wooden ceiling whose projecting beams cross each other in a distinctly irregular manner in the north-east corner.

This irregularity is made still more obvious by a wooden staircase with a balustrade somewhat elaborately worked, and of a massive character, seemingly of the end of the sixteenth century or the beginning of the seventeenth. This staircase goes up six steps, pauses at a small landing-place, turns a right angle, and after six steps more ends abruptly in the wall. The arrangements of the building have been changed; and it would have been natural to remove the staircase at the same time, for it only encumbers the room. Why was this not done? This, dear reader, is the question we put to each other. But, notwithstanding this proof of respect or indifference, the apartment which we are examining has retained all its ancient comforts. An immense circular stove, in which no fire has been lighted for a long time, serves as a pedestal for a very handsome clock of the style of Boule, whose glasses, tarnished and almost iridescent with moisture, throw out metallic reflections into the gloom. A handsome copper chandelier of the Dutch fashion hangs from the ceiling, covered with a coat of verdigris so thick, that it looks like a piece of malachite work. Twelve wax candles, whole (with one exception), though yellow with age, are still standing in the wide metallic sockets, whose size has the advantage of not allowing a drop of wax to fall, and the disadvantage of casting a deep shadow on the floor, while the light is all reflected up to the ceiling.

The twelfth of the candles in this chandelier is three-fourths burnt away. We happen to note this, friendly reader, because we are examining everything with such minute attention. Otherwise we might very easily have overlooked it, in consequence of the strange ornament which partly covers the chandelier and its candles, and hangs along its branches in opaque folds. Probably you take it to be a piece of gray cloth long ago thrown over the fixture to protect the copper. Touch it, if you can reach high enough. You see that it is an accumulation of spiders’ webs, almost as compact as parchment, and loaded with dust.

These spiders’ webs are everywhere else too. They hang all over the smoked frames of the large family portraits that fill three sides of the room, and in the corners they are festooned with a sort of regularity, as if some austere and industrious fate had assumed the form of a spider, and undertaken to furnish hangings for these deserted wainscots, complete enough to cover even the least crevice.

But of the spiders themselves you will not find one. The cold has made them torpid, or killed them; and if you should be obliged—as I hope you will not—to pass a night in this melancholy room, you would not have even these industrious little creatures to keep you company. The clock, whose tick-tack is not unlike the regular ticking of some insects, is mute as they. Its hands have stood still upon the dial at four o’clock in the morning, for God knows how many years.

I say four o’clock in the morning, for the reason that in the country where we now are, the striking part of old timepieces indicates whether the hours are those of the night or of the day—for there the days are sometimes only five hours long, and the nights nineteen. If you were fatigued with your journey and should sleep late, you might not know, when you awoke, whether it was the next morning after your arrival, or the next morning but one. If the clock were going it would tell you, but it is not, and it is impossible to tell whether it could be made to go.

Well; what country is it? We shall learn without having to go outside the room. Along the whole length of the irregular wall, by which the staircase is built, and which, like the three other sides, is more than half covered with oaken wainscot, large maps are hung; very likely because their shape rendered it a convenient place. They are longer horizontally than their height, and accordingly just cover that part of the wall above the wood-work. They seem to be banished here rather than exhibited, and we shall have to go up the twelve steps of the staircase ending in the wall, to convince ourselves that these long bands of parchment, colored in the hardest tints, are maps, charts, and plans of strong cities.

The staircase leads us precisely to the height of that one of these maps representing the country, which was undoubtedly placed just there for convenience of consultation; and also, perhaps, to hide the place where a door has been built up.

This great green serpent in the middle of the picture is the Baltic Sea. I presume that you recognize it from its resemblance to a dolphin with a double tail, and from the innumerable indentations of its fiords—narrow and winding gulfs that run far into the rocky coast.

Don’t get lost on the side of Finland, which is there painted in yellow ochre; look on the other shore for about the middle of Sweden (painted red), and you will recognize, from its lakes, from its rivers and mountains, the province of Dalecarlia, a region which was still comparatively uncivilized at the time to which this story refers. It is in the last century, towards the close of the kindly but troubled reign of Adolphus-Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, at one time the Protestant Bishop of Lubeck, but who afterwards married Ulrica of Prussia, the friend of Voltaire, the sister of Frederick the Great; in a word, as far as we can judge, it is about the year 1770.

Rather later, we shall see the aspect of this country. You must be satisfied at present, dear reader, to know that you are in a small, old chateau, perched on a rock, in the very centre of a frozen lake, which will naturally lead you to conclude that I have carried you there in midwinter.

And now a last glance at this room while it is still ours; for, gloomy and cold as it is, we shall soon have competitors for the use of it. It is furnished with old chairs of wood, quite artistically carved, but massive and inconvenient. One arm-chair, comparatively modern—that is of the time of Louis XVI.—is covered with silk that has become yellowed and stained, but it is still soft, and of a convenient shape for sleeping; it looks out of place in the solemn company of the other worm-eaten chairs, with their high backs, which, for more than twenty years, have not been moved from the wall. To conclude, an old bed, with four twisted columns and curtains of tattered silk, stands in the corner opposite the staircase, and adds, by its dilapidated appearance, to the gloomy and sinister aspect of the place.

But we must retire, reader. The door opens, and you must depend upon me hereafter if you wish to know about the past and future events whose theatre I have thus shown you.

[I.]

FOR a full quarter of an hour some one had been knocking and ringing at the outside door of the gothic manor of Stollborg; but the bourrasque was blowing so very furiously, and old Stenson was so extremely deaf! The old man’s nephew, Ulphilas, a colossal blond who assisted him in his duties, heard somewhat better, but he believed in ghosts, and was not at all anxious to open the door to them. M. Stenson, former steward of the Baron de Waldemora, was an invalid, and a man of melancholy character; he was at present the overseer of Stollborg; and he lived in one of the pavilions of this old, battered, and abandoned chateau. It really seemed to him that some one was knocking at the door of the court, but Ulphilas judiciously called his attention to the fact that the goblins and trolls of the lake were in the habit of playing just such tricks. Stenson, with a sigh, began to read his old Bible again, and in a very few moments went to bed.

At last, the persons outside became so impatient that they forced the lock of the door, introduced themselves into the court, and, following a narrow gallery on the ground-floor, entered, with their ass, the very room that we have just described, which was called the bear-room, from the crowned animal carved on the armorial shield above the outside window.

The door of this room was usually fastened, and its being open to-day was due to an unusual circumstance, about which, however, the strangers did not trouble themselves at all.

Rather strange-looking individuals were these unexpected visitors of Stollborg! One of them was wrapped up in a sheepskin, and looked like one of those ugly scarecrows that are used in gardens and hemp-fields to frighten birds; the other, who was tall and well made, resembled a good-natured Italian brigand.

The ass was a fine ass: strong, and carrying a load that would have been sufficient for an ox; he was so accustomed to travelling adventures, that he made no sort of objection to going up several steps, and showed no surprise when he found himself treading upon a pine floor instead of the straw of a stable. The poor ass was ill, however, and the taller of the two travellers who was leading him, looked after his comfort before attending to anything else.

“Puffo,” he said, placing his lantern on a large table in the middle of the room, “Jean has a cold; he is coughing as if he would split his lungs.”

“Parbleu, I am no better off myself!” replied Puffo in Italian, the same language which his companion had employed; “do you suppose, master, that it makes a fellow fresh and jolly to drag him about in this devil of a country?”

“I too am cold and tired,” replied the master, as Puffo called him; “but there is no use in complaining. Here we are, and we must not allow ourselves to die of cold. Look and see whether this is really the bear-room that we were told about.”

“How shall I recognize it?”

“By those maps, and a staircase which leads nowhere. Was not that what they told us at the farm?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” replied Puffo. “I can’t understand their beastly patois.”

As he spoke, he took the lantern, and holding it higher than his head, said:

“What do I know about geography?”

His master looked up and exclaimed:

“This is the very room. There are the maps; and here,” he added, running lightly up the wooden staircase, and lifting the map that hung over the wall at the top of it, “is the place walled up. It’s all right, Puffo, we need not distress ourselves any longer. The room is perfectly tight, and we can sleep here like princes.”

“However, I don’t see—Oh yes! there is a bed, but there are neither mattresses nor coverlids, and they told us there were two good beds.”

“You are quite a Sybarite! Do you require a bed wherever you go, my good fellow? Look and see if there is any wood in the stove, and light the fire.”

“There’s no wood at all; nothing but coal.”

“That is still better. Light the fire, my lad, light it. As for me, I am going to attend to this poor Jean.”

Taking a piece of carpet that lay before the stove, the young man began to rub the ass so vigorously, that in a few moments he himself was all in a glow.

“I was fairly warned,” he said to Puffo, who was lighting the fire, “that the ass would suffer from the cold beyond the fifty-second degree of north latitude; but I did not believe it. The ass is not so delicate as the horse, which lives in Lapland; and besides, this one of ours is so healthy and good-natured! We can only hope that he will be as lucky as ourselves, and will keep alive for several days. He has not refused to work yet, and the poor beast carries with perfect docility a larger load than two horses would probably take, at least without being very much urged.”

“No matter for that!” replied Puffo, kneeling before the stove, which was beginning to roar and sputter as if it were going to burn well; “you ought to have sold him in Stockholm, where so many people wanted him.”

“Sell Jean! Sell him to be stuffed for a museum? Never, so help me heaven! He has worked well for me for a whole year; and, for my part, I love this faithful servant. Who knows, Puffo, whether I shall be able to say as much for you a year hence?”

“Pshaw, Master Cristiano! I don’t care. Sentiment is not in my line; and I should trouble myself very little about the ass, if I could only find something to eat and drink.”

“There is something in that, I confess. Sentiment does not take away the appetite, and I am as hungry as all the devils. Come, Puffo, let us be sensible, and go over what we have heard. They said at the new chateau—‘We have no room for you here. Even if you should come in the name of the king, we could not find you a corner as large as your hand. Go and lodge at the farm.’ At the farm they said about the same thing; but they gave us a lantern, and showing us a road cut out over the ice of the lake, advised us to go to the old chateau. The road is not agreeable, I acknowledge, amid these whirlwinds of snow, but the distance is short. You can return in ten minutes, at the outside, and my opinion is that you will have to make up your mind to do this, if you want any supper.”

“But what if they turn us away from the farm as they did from the new chateau? They will say, perhaps, that they have already too much company to provide for, and that they have not a scrap of bread left for vagrants like us.”

“The fact is, that our appearance is not prepossessing. That is what makes me afraid that this worthy M. Stenson, the old overseer who lives somewhere about the building, and who is very ill-tempered, they say, will drive us off the premises. But listen, Puffo: either the good man must be fast asleep, since we have succeeded in breaking open the door of the court and reaching this room without hindrance, or the noise of the wind drowns every other sound. Now what we have to do is to steal quietly into the kitchen, and the devil is to pay if we cannot find anything there.”

“Much obliged to you,” said Puffo; “I prefer recrossing the lake and going to the farm. There the people, although busy, were very polite, while old Stenson, it seems, is wicked, and a sort of monomaniac.”

“Just as you choose, my good Puffo; off with you! Bring something back, if it is a possible thing, to warm us up a little. One word more, my sublime companion;—listen once for all.”

“What is the matter now?” said Puffo, who was already tying the strings of his sheepskin in preparation for his departure.

“In the first place,” replied Cristiano, “you must give me time to light one of the candles of this chandelier before carrying off the lantern.”

“How can you reach them? I don’t see any great supply of ladders in this damned bear-room.”

“Stand there, I am going to climb on your shoulders. Are you firm?”

“Go on, you are not very heavy!”

“Now comrade,” said the young man, planting his feet upon Puffo’s broad shoulders, and seizing one of the branches of the chandelier with one hand, while with the other he tried to snatch a candle from its socket, without bringing down the dusty spiders’ webs into his eyes; “listen to me! I have not precisely the honor of knowing you. For three months we have been travelling companions, and aside from the fact that you are rather too fond of taverns, you seem to me to be not a bad fellow; but you may be a great rogue for all that, and I am not sorry to have an opportunity of telling you—”

“Say what you are going to, and have done with it, will you?” replied Puffo, shaking himself a little. “I wish you would make haste up there, instead of lecturing. You are not so light as I thought.”

“I have done,” replied Cristiano, leaping nimbly to the earth, for he imagined that his companion was a little inclined to let him fall; “I have got my candle, and will continue my discourse. We are, for the moment, two Bohemians, Puffo—two poor adventurers; but I am in the habit of behaving like a sensible man, while you sometimes take pleasure in conducting yourself like a beast. Now, I want you to understand that the greatest folly, the meanest and flattest thing that a man can be guilty of in my eyes, is to follow the trade of a thief.”

“Where did you ever see me stealing?” said Puffo, gloomily.

“If I had seen you stealing in my company I should have broken your back, my friend; that is why it is only fair that I should let you know what my views on the subject are. I told you just now to try and obtain some supper by persuasion or cunning. So far we have a right to go. We were invited into this snow paradise to employ our talents for the entertainment of a large party of distinguished persons. We were provided with money to pay the expenses of the journey, and it is not our fault that it was lost. We are promised a sufficient amount, of which I intend to give you a handsome share, although you are only the apprentice, while I am the master. We have no reason to complain, therefore, but always on condition that we are not left to die of cold and hunger. Now we happen to arrive at our employer’s chateau at night, just as his illustrious guests have gone to supper, when his highly respectable lackeys are in a great hurry to get their supper, and when belated travellers have no right to be hungry. Consequently it is a matter of necessity for us to get our own supper to-night in some way or other, so that we may be in condition to fulfil our engagements to-morrow. We shall neither offend heaven nor our host by laying hands upon a few good dishes and some bottles of wine; but, to slip silver into our pockets and hide linen under the pack-saddle of our ass, would be an asinine proceeding, since silver is not good to eat, and since it ruins linen to be stowed away under a saddle. Do you understand, Puffo? We are perfectly authorized in taking food, but no stealing, or a hundred lashes on your back. That is what I intended to tell you.”

“All right!” replied Puffo, shrugging his shoulders; “you have been a long time coming to the point. You are a dreadful chatterbox.”

Puffo went off with the lantern in a state of considerable discontent with his patron, who had, in fact, good reasons for suspecting his honesty, having several times discovered among his professional apparatus sundry objects whose sudden acquisition Puffo had been unable to explain in a satisfactory manner.

It was not without reason, upon the other hand, that Puffo accused Cristiano of being a chatterbox. He was, at all events, a great talker, as all men endowed with strong intellectual and physical vitality are apt to be. Puffo, with his mere rude glibness of speech and his vulgar instincts, felt the ascendency of a mind and character infinitely superior to his own. He, however, was the stronger of the two, and when the tall and slender Cristiano threatened this thick-set and muscular Livornese, it was his moral influence or his agility that he relied upon, rather than physical strength, to enforce his authority.

When Cristiano was left alone, he abandoned himself to his innocent affection for his ass. He had relieved him from his baggage as soon as they entered the bear-room. This baggage, consisting of two large boxes, a bundle of light poles of white wood with their cross-pieces taken apart, and finally a package of curtains and tapestries which were still quite fresh, carefully rolled in a leather case, he arranged in a corner. All this was his artistic apparatus,—the tools of his trade, his livelihood. As for his wardrobe, it gave him no sort of trouble. It consisted merely of a little bundle of linen tied up in a handkerchief, and a cloak of coarse cloth, which made a good covering for Jean when it left the back of its owner. The rest of his effects he wore—to wit, a Venetian cape a good deal defaced, small-clothes of some stout material, and three pair of woollen stockings, one over the other.

His cape, his woollen cap, and his broad-brimmed hat, Cristiano had taken off, so as to be more at his ease in setting things to rights. He was a tall, slender fellow, with a remarkably handsome face, shaded by a profusion of black hair in great disorder.

The warmth of the stove began to make itself felt, and besides, the young man was too vigorous to be sensitive to the cold. He went about the room, therefore, in his shirt-sleeves, and made arrangements to pass the night as comfortably as possible. It was not the absence of the beds they had been told about that troubled him, but the fear that he would not be able to find Jean anything to eat and drink.

“I was very foolish,” he said to himself, “not to think about that as I passed the new chateau and the farm; but how can one think of anything with the wind blowing ice-needles into his eyes? They told us at the farm (and I remember now that they said so in a very sarcastic way) that we would find an abundance of everything at the old chateau, if old Stenson would be good enough to let us in; now as we were obliged to break the door open, it seems that he was not good enough. Well, whether or no, I must find out how the Cerberus of this old ruin will take our being here. After all, I have my contract in my pocket, and, if they try to turn me out here too, I will show my teeth.”

Thereupon Cristiano placed Jean, together with his baggage, in the recess under the staircase, and as he was seeking, candle in hand, for a nail or peg to which to tie the ass, he saw that there was a door in the wainscot just at the farthest part of this recess, and in the defective angle of the room.

As he had not noticed the irregularity in the plan of the room, he could not tell whether the passage-way into which the door opened was in a thick wall, or between two walls joined above. He pushed the secret door—for it was one—without expecting that it would open, and, seeing that it was not fastened in any way, he cautiously went forward to see what he could find. He had not gone three steps when the candle went out. Luckily the fire was burning, and he was able to light it again, while listening with a certain pleasure to the sharp and melancholy whistling of the wind in the secret passage.

Cristiano had a romantic disposition, and was in the habit of indulging in poetic fancies. It seemed to him that the spirits so long imprisoned in this abandoned hall were complaining at being disturbed in their mysteries; and as he was afraid, moreover, that the cold would increase poor Jean’s cough, he took pains, when he went out again, to shut the door after him; he had noticed, beforehand, that there were strong bolts on the outside, but that its own weight was sufficient to keep it in its place.

We will leave him for the present to proceed on his expedition, and introduce another traveller into the bear-room.

This also is an unexpected visitor, but he is accompanied by Ulphilas, who lights him with respect, while they are followed by a shivering little serving-lad, dressed in a full suit of red. These three persons are talking Dalecarlian, and they are still in the court, Ulphilas with a terrified expression, and the two others looking very impatient.

“Come, Ulph, come, my lad,” said the stranger, “don’t be so formal; light us to this famous room, and attend to my horse at once. He is all in a sweat with dragging the sleigh up your little rock. Good horse! I would not lose him for ten thousand rix dollars.”

The person who addressed Ulphilas thus was the senior advocate of the city of Gevala, Doctor of Laws of the Faculty of Lund.

“What, Monsieur Goefle,[1] do you want to stay here all night? Do you really mean so?”

“Hush, hush! I know it will annoy honest Sten; but, when I am once installed, he will have to make up his mind to it. Take the horse, I tell you—I know the way.”

“What, Monsieur Advocate, you come here all alone in the night with your grandson?”

“You rascal! you know very well that I have no children. Here, little Nils, come and help me unharness poor Loki. You see that it is the fashion here to talk, and do nothing else. Come, rouse yourself; are you frozen with a trip of three or four hours at nightfall?”

“Leave him alone, Monsieur Goefle, he is too little,” said Ulphilas, feeling the lawyer’s reproach. “Take the first door to the right, and get under shelter; I will answer for the horse.”

“Nonsense, it has stopped snowing! This little flurry has only made the weather milder,” resumed M. Goefle, who, both by profession and taste, was no less of a talker than Cristiano. “I have not been cold at all, and shall do capitally if I eat a good plate of porridge, and smoke a good pipe, before going to bed. Come, Nils, carry one of these bundles into the room yonder; it will be something for you to do, and will warm you. Are you asleep already? It is not more than seven o’clock.”

“Oh, Monsieur Goefle,” said the little lad, with his teeth chattering, “it has been night for a long time, and I am always so afraid in the night.”

“Afraid? Of what, pray? Well, console yourself; at this season the days are getting a minute and a half longer daily.”

Talking away after this fashion, M. Goefle, who was a man of about sixty, dry, active and cheerful, himself put the horse into the stable, while Ulphilas drew the sleigh into the coach-house, and hung up the harness and bells. In the meanwhile, little Nils still sat shivering on the luggage which was under the wooden gallery around the court.

When M. Goefle was satisfied that his beloved Loki, the handsome and generous little horse whom he had named for the Prometheus of the Scandinavian mythology, would want for nothing, he turned, and with his firm step proceeded towards the bear-room.

“Wait, wait, Monsieur Advocate,” said Ulphilas, “that is not the way. The double-bedded room that we call the guard-room—”

“Parbleu! I know all about it,” replied M. Goefle. “I have slept in it before now.”

“Perhaps so, but that was a long time ago. It is so out of repair now—”

“Well, if it is out of repair you can make me up a bed in the bear-room.”

“In the—”

Ulph dared not finish, so monstrous did M. Goefle’s suggestions seem. Taking courage after a pause, he resumed:—

“No, M. Goefle, no! That is impossible; you are joking! I will go and look for the key of the other room, which perhaps is in a better state than I thought (my uncle sometimes goes there), and since there is a second door to the gallery, you won’t have the annoyance of going through, you know.”

“What! Has not that poor bear-room lost its bad reputation since the staircase door was walled up? Nonsense, Ulph, my lad, you are old enough to know better. I insist upon your opening the door immediately. It is too cold to wait here while you go in search of other keys, and since you have it about you—”

“I haven’t got it!” cried Ulphilas. “I swear to you, M. Goefle, that I haven’t got the key of the bear any more than that of the guard.”

While discussing thus, M. Goefle, accompanied by Ulphilas, who lighted him very unwillingly, and Nils, who followed close at his heels, reached the second door of the donjon, upon the ground-floor of which the bear-room was situated. As this door was only fastened by an outside bolt, the advocate entered the inner court without difficulty, and going up three steps, pushed the door of the bear-room, which, yielding to his impatient hand, opened wide with such a plaintive squeak, that Nils started back in terror.

“Open! It was open!” cried Ulphilas, turning as pale as his red and shining face was capable of becoming.

“Well, suppose it was?” said M. Goefle. “Stenson, no doubt, has been through this way.”

“He never comes here, Monsieur Goefle. Oh, there’s no danger of that!”

“So much the better, then. I can get settled without troubling him, and without his knowing anything about it. But what have you been telling me? Some one must have been here, for there is a fire in the stove! I see how it is, Monsieur Ulphilas Stenson! You have let or promised this room to some one whom you are waiting for. The deuce! so much the worse for them. There is no room at the new chateau, and you must make room for me here. But never mind, my poor fellow, I will pay you as well as any one. Light these candles; that is to say, go and get something to trim them with, and then bring bed-clothes, warming-pans, whatever we may need; and, above all things, don’t forget the supper. Nils will help you; he is very quick, very skilful, and very obliging. Come, Nils, exert yourself: find our bed-room, the guard-room, as Ulphilas calls it, all alone; I know where it is, but I won’t tell you. Look for it; show us how bright you are, Master Nils.”

Good Monsieur Goefle might as well have been talking in a desert. Ulphilas was standing petrified in the middle of the room, Nils was warming his hands at the stove, and the doctor was left to get settled as he best could.

At last Ulph heaved a sigh that might have turned a mill-wheel, and said in an emphatic voice,—

“Upon my honor, Monsieur Goefle, upon my eternal salvation, I have neither let nor promised this room to any one. How can you think such a thing when you know what has happened here, and what goes on even now. Oh! nothing would induce my uncle Stenson to let you stop here. I will inform him of your arrival, and since they were not able to accommodate you at the new chateau, he will give you up his own room.”

“I will not allow anything of the kind,” replied M. Goefle; “you must not even tell him that I have come. He will learn to-morrow that I am here, and am very comfortable. The guard-room is rather small, but it will do very well for sleeping, and this shall be my drawing-room and office. It is not particularly cheerful; but for two or three days I shall be quiet, at least.”

“Quiet!” cried Ulphilas. “Quiet in a room haunted by the devil?”

“What makes you think that, friend Ulph?” said the doctor of laws, smiling, while little Nils began to shiver again, from fear quite as much as the wintry cold.

“I think so for three reasons,” replied Ulph, with gloomy solemnity. “In the first place, you found the door of the court open, although I had locked it after sunset; in the second place, the door of this room was also open, a thing that has not happened since I came here five years ago to take care of my uncle and wait upon him. The third and most incredible thing of all is, that there is a fire lighted, and that the stove is warm, although no fire has been made here for twenty years, and perhaps more. Lastly—hold, Monsieur Doctor, look!—there is some wax freshly spilled on the floor, and yet—”

“You spilled it yourself, you idiot; you are holding your lantern upside-down.”

“Oh, no, Monsieur Goefle! mine is a tallow candle, and that under the chandelier—wait!”

Ulph looked up and uttered a cry of horror on seeing that there were only ten candles and a half in the chandelier, instead of eleven and a half.

The lawyer was naturally kind and good-natured. Instead of allowing the preoccupation of Ulphilas, and the terror of Nils, to make him angry, he only thought of amusing himself at their expense.

“Well, God be praised!” he said, very seriously, “that proves that there are kobolds here; and if they will only be so good as to appear to me (I have wanted to become acquainted with them all my life, without ever seeing a single one), I shall congratulate myself all the more upon coming to this room, where I can sleep under their kind protection.”

“No, no, Monsieur Doctor,” replied Ulphilas, “there are no kobolds here! This is a melancholy and accursed place, as you know; a place where the trolls of the lake come to disturb and spoil everything, like wicked spirits as they are, while the little kobolds are friendly to man, and only think of doing him good. The kobolds save, and do not waste. They never carry anything away—”

“On the contrary, they bring! I know all about that, Master Ulph; but how do you know that I have not a kobold of my own who came on here before me? Very likely he took the candle to light the fire, so that I might find a warm place on my arrival; and, knowing that you were a great coward, who would keep me waiting a long time, opened the doors beforehand. Now, he is all ready, no doubt, to help you about my supper, if you will only be as good as to attend to it, for you know kobolds don’t like lazy folks, and only wait upon those who show a disposition to help others.”

This explanation soothed, in a measure, the fears of his two auditors. Nils ventured to turn his great blue eyes upon the gloomy walls of the apartment, and Ulph, after giving the lawyer a key to the closet of the guard-room, went to prepare their supper.

“Well, Nils,” said the lawyer to his little servant, “we can scarcely see at all with this abominable lantern. You can make up the beds later; in the meanwhile, go and unpack my trunk. Put it on the table.”

“But, Monsieur Doctor,” said the child, “I cannot so much as lift it; it is heavy.”

“True,” replied the lawyer; “it is full of papers, and is very heavy.”

He himself took the trunk, and with a slight effort placed it upon a chair, adding,—

“At any rate, take the valise with my clothes. I have only brought what was necessary, and it is very light.”

Nils obeyed, but he could not open the padlock.

“I thought you were more skilful than that,” said the lawyer, becoming a little impatient; “your aunt told me—I am afraid my good Gertrude praised you rather too highly.”

“Oh,” replied the child, “I can open trunks very well when they are not locked. But tell me, Monsieur Goefle, is it true that you have a kobold to wait upon you?”

“What, a kobold? Oh yes! I was thinking of something else. Do you believe in kobolds, my boy?”

“Yes, if there are any. Aren’t they wicked sometimes?”

“Never; especially as they do not exist.”

“Oh, but you said just now—”

“I only said that to laugh at that blockhead. As for you, Nils, I don’t want you to believe in any such nonsense. You know that I intend to make you something more than a mere servant; to educate you a little, and make you sensible, if I can.”

“But, Monsieur Goefle, my aunt Gertrude believes in them. She believes in good and bad spirits.”

“My housekeeper? She takes good care not to acknowledge it before me. She pretends to be strong-minded, when I have time to talk to her. No, no, you are mistaken; she doesn’t believe anything of the kind. She only says so to amuse you.”

“But it doesn’t amuse me at all; it makes me afraid, and keeps me awake all night.”

“In that case she is wrong. But what are you about? Is that the way that you unpack a trunk, throwing everything on the floor? Was it so that the pastor of Falun taught you to wait on him?”

“I did not wait upon the pastor, Monsieur Goefle. He only took me to play with his little boy, who was ill, and we had such a good time! We used to make little paper boats, and little bread sleighs, all day long.”

“Oh, ho! that is worth knowing!” said the doctor of laws, angrily; “and Gertrude told me that you were so useful in that house.”

“I was very useful, Monsieur Goefle!”

“Yes, making paper boats and bread sleighs! That assuredly is a very useful employment! But let me tell you that if you can’t do anything else, at your age—”

“I know as much as other children ten years old, Monsieur Goefle.”

“The devil! ten years old? Are you only ten years old? Your aunt said that you were thirteen or fourteen. Well, brat, what is the matter? What are you crying about?”

“Why, Monsieur Doctor, you are scolding me; it is not my fault if I am only ten years old.”

“Correct! That is the first sensible remark you have made since I was so fortunate as to take you into my service this morning. Come, dry your eyes and wipe your nose. I am not angry. You are large and strong for your age, at all events; and what you don’t know, you will learn. What do you say?”

“Oh yes, Monsieur Goefle! that is just what I should like.”

“But will you learn quickly? I am very impatient, I can tell you!”

“Yes indeed, monsieur, I will learn everything right off.”

“Do you know how to make a bed?”

“I think so. At the pastor’s I always used to make mine all by myself.”

“Or you did not make it at all! Never mind, we shall soon see.”

“But, Monsieur Goefle, when my aunt came to Falun this morning to see me off on my journey, she told me that I wouldn’t have to work. She said: ‘You won’t have anything to do at the chateau where you are going with your master. In the chateau of the Baron de—de—’”

“De Waldemora?”

“Yes, that’s it!—‘there are beautiful rooms always in order, and plenty of servants to do everything. What Monsieur Goefle wants is, that you should always be on hand to give orders in his place. He don’t wish to take François, because François would never stay in his room. He was always drinking, and amusing himself with the other servants, and monsieur would have to run and hunt him up to get what he wanted. That put him out, and he did not like it at all. Now you must be very good, and never leave him; do you hear? You must see that he is well waited upon, and then you will be waited upon too.’”

“So,” said the doctor, “that is what you expect!”

“I am sure I am very good, Monsieur Goefle. I don’t leave you; I am not running about with the tall servants at the chateau.”

“Would to heaven you were! I defy you to do anything of the kind, however, in our present quarters.”

“Why? Is the road over the lake the only way to the new chateau?”

“The only way; otherwise, I see plainly that you would already be with the tall valets in livery.”

“Oh no, Monsieur Goefle, since you wouldn’t like it! But how beautiful it was over there!”

“Where, at Waldemora?”

“Yes, that’s the name of the new chateau. Oh, Monsieur Goefle, it was a great deal prettier than it is here! And there were so many people I didn’t feel at all afraid.”

“Very good, Master Nils! That magnificent palace, with its splendid company, its turmoil, torches, feasting and revelry, has turned your head for you, I’m afraid. For my part, it doesn’t suit my taste to spend the night at a ball, and wait until day for the chance of sharing a room with four or five young fools, intoxicated, and perhaps quarrelsome. I like to eat little, but often and quietly, to sleep only a few hours, but without being disturbed. Besides, I did not come here to amuse myself. I have important business to transact for the baron, and I must have my room, my table, my writing-desk, and a little silence. The baron is to blame, I must say, for allowing himself to forget, amid his festivities and entertainments, that I am no longer a young student, eager for music and dancing. He ought to have had this room prepared for me, or some other, in a quiet place, out of the reach of importunate visitors. When I saw the amazement of the servants at my arrival, and their inability to provide me with suitable quarters, it would have taken very little to make me return to Falun. But I was afraid of the snow-storm, and then Loki was too warm; I remembered, happily, that there was a haunted room at old Stollborg that every one was afraid of, and which, consequently, was never used. Here we are, and we are very well off. To-morrow, Nils, you must give a thorough dusting. I like neatness, for my part.”

“Yes, Monsieur Goefle, I will tell Ulph. I am not tall enough to reach so high.”

“So I see. Well, we will tell Ulph.”

“Why do they call this the bear-room, Monsieur Goefle?”

“It is a name like any other,” replied the lawyer, who was arranging his papers in the drawer of the table, and who did not think it worth while to explain the shield to master Nils.

Soon, however, he noticed that the child’s terror had redoubled.

“What is the matter?” he said impatiently. “You do nothing but follow me about, and don’t give me the least assistance.”

“I am afraid of the bear,” replied the courageous Nils. “At Falun you were speaking with the pastor about the great bear. I could understand.”

“I was speaking about the great bear! What do you mean? Oh yes, you are right! The pastor is something of an astronomer, and we were saying—take courage, my brave youth—we were talking about the great bear up in the sky.”

“Oh! the great bear is up in the sky!” cried Nils, recovering his spirits. “Then it is not here? It will not come into this room?”

“No,” said the lawyer, laughing; “it is too far away, too high up! If it should try to come down it would break its paws. Now, then, you are no longer afraid?”

“Oh no! I am not afraid now! But what if it should tumble down?”

“Bah! It is fastened firmly by seven large diamond nails!”

“Was it the good God who nailed it up there because it was so wicked?”

“Probably! Are you quite sure now that you are not afraid?”

“Oh yes!” said Nils, with a gesture of profound incredulity.

“Go and look for Ulph, then, and tell him—”

“But, M. Goefle, you spoke also about the Snow Man!”

“So we did! You listen to everything that is said, it seems. That is very agreeable.”

“Oh yes, monsieur!” replied Nils, ingenuously; “I listen to everything.”

“And what is the Snow Man, in your opinion?”

“I don’t know. The pastor whispered to you, laughing: ‘So you are going to see the Snow Man?’”

“He was talking, I suppose, about some mountain that has that name.”

“Oh, no indeed! For you said: ‘Does he walk as straight as ever?’ and the pastor said: ‘He is always hunting on his lake.’ Oh, I understand Swedish just as well as Dalecarlian!”

“And what do you think from that?”

“Oh, that there is a great tall snow man who walks on the lake we have just come over.”

“Exactly! And who is always followed by a great bear! You have some imagination, child! Is the bear white, or black?”

“I don’t know, Monsieur Goefle.”

“We ought to know about that, though, before deciding to take supper in this room. What if they should come and sit down at the table with us?”

Nils saw plainly that M. Goefle was joking, and he began to laugh. The lawyer was congratulating himself upon his method of curing children of fear, when the little fellow, who had suddenly become serious again, said:

“Monsieur Goefle, let us go away from here. This is a very ugly place.”

“This is too much!” cried the lawyer, pettishly. “What plagues children are! I am good enough to explain to my young gentleman that the bear is a constellation, and he is more frightened then ever.”

Nils, seeing that his master was angry, began to cry. He was a spoiled child, yet timid. M. Goefle, who was thoroughly good-hearted, imagined, and took pleasure in saying, that he did not like children, and that if anything could console him for not having married at a proper age, it was the intellectual freedom that is enjoyed by those who have no children to take care of and be responsible for. The keen sensibility with which he was endowed, however, which his stirring and active professional life had developed without his knowledge, made it impossible for him to endure the tears and complaints of the weak. Accordingly he tried to console and encourage his little valet, at the very same time that he was grumbling at his folly, and while persisting in his passion for intellectual and subtle discussions, a style of argument that gains cases when you are trying to persuade men, but which is almost sure to lose them when you are dealing with children. He even went so far as to promise that he would run the great bear through the body with his sword, if it should come to the door of the room, rather than allow it to enter.

M. Goefle excused himself the more readily for his absurd condescension, as he called it, because he found that a witty account of his evening at Stollborg, with which he proposed to entertain his friends at Gevala, was involuntarily taking form in his mind.

In the meanwhile Ulph did not return. That he would require some time to get up a supper in M. Stenson’s modest establishment, the lawyer was prepared to anticipate; but he did not bring back the light, and this was an unpardonable piece of forgetfulness.

The end of the candle was going out in the lantern, and the lawyer, who prided himself upon his white hands and irreproachable ruffles, dared not touch this villanous utensil to light himself about the room. He was obliged to submit to this disagreeable necessity, however, in order to go into the adjoining apartment; he wanted to search the closet, whose key Ulph had given him, and which he hoped might contain some provisions or pieces of candle. Nils followed, holding him softly by the flap of the coat.

These two rooms which M. Goefle proposed to occupy, were separated from each other by an unusually thick wall, and two solid doors. The lawyer was well acquainted with the locality, but it was so long since his business had required him to visit the interior of the building, that he had some difficulty in finding the first of the two doors. He looked for it opposite the outer entrance, and he was right; but instead of being on a straight line with it, it was a little to the left. Like the secret door that Cristiano had accidentally discovered under the staircase, and whose existence had never been suspected either by the doctor or Ulphilas, it was entirely concealed in the wainscot. There was no affectation of mystery, however, in this style of door, closing perfectly without any visible lock; this peculiarity was merely the result of very careful joinery work, which becomes almost an art in cold countries.

M. Goefle did not find it necessary to look into the closet, after he had once taken possession of the double-bedded room. Glancing at the mantle-piece, he saw a pair of heavy candlesticks with three branches, each of them holding three wax candles. It was time; the end of the candle was expiring in the lantern.

“Since there is no danger of our being left in the dark,” said M. Goefle to the child, “we may as well make our arrangements here at once. Light the fire, and I will take the bed-clothes from the closet.”

The bed-clothes were laid upon the beds before Nils had succeeded in doing anything more than fill the room with smoke. When it was time to make the beds, which were enormous, he could think of nothing better than climbing up on top of them, so as to reach the middle of the bolster. M. Goefle was very much inclined to get angry, but since this would only have been a signal for tears, he resigned himself to his fate, and made not only his own bed, but that also of his little valet.

Although he had never done any work of the kind, he was succeeding very creditably, when a fearful noise in the bear-room (the doors between the two rooms had been left open) interrupted him. It was a sort of wild, unearthly, and yet absurd yell. Nils tumbled down on his hands and knees, and considered it prudent to hide under the bed, while M. Goefle, with staring eyes and open mouth, asked himself, without any alarm, but with great surprise, what could be the meaning of such a serenade.

“If, as I firmly believe,” he thought, “it is some practical joker who wants to frighten me, he imitates the growling of the bear in a singular manner. The voice of the ass he really does reproduce, and with remarkable skill; but does he take me for a Laplander, and imagine that I have never heard an ass bray? Come, come, Nils,” he continued, looking for his little valet, “there is no magic here; let us go and see what the matter is.”

Nils would have perished rather than stir, or even answer; and M. Goefle, not knowing what had become of him, went in alone to reconnoitre.

He was not a little surprised to find himself, in the middle of the bear-room, face to face with a veritable ass, and a fine one too (he had never seen its equal in Sweden), with such an honest countenance, that it was impossible to give him an unkind reception, or to take his visit in bad part.

“Well, my poor friend,” said Monsieur Goefle, laughing, “where do you come from? What are you doing in this country, and what request did you just make of me?”

If Jean had had the gift of human speech, he would have replied that he had taken a good nap, while confidently awaiting his master’s return, in his hiding-place under the staircase, where no one had thought of looking; but that, finding that his master did not return, and beginning to feel very hungry, he had lost patience, and, undoing the rope, which was not well tied, had come to ask M. Goefle for some supper.

The latter easily guessed what he wanted, but he could not understand why Ulph, whom he supposed intrusted with the care of this ass, should have given him the haunted chamber of Stollborg for a stable. He thought of a world of things. As this animal is a great rarity in cold countries, the baron, who had a team of reindeer as well (another rarity in this region, too cold for the ass and not cold enough for the reindeer), probably valued him very highly, and had ordered the overseer of the old chateau to take care of him, and keep him in a warm place.

“That accounts for the fire in the stove,” said M. Goefle to himself; “but I can’t understand why Ulph, instead of telling the simple truth, should have pretended to believe the room haunted. Perhaps he was ordered to fit up one of the stables for the occasion, and not having done so, wished to conceal his negligence; he hoped, no doubt, that I would be disgusted with the room, or would not notice the presence of this strange companion. Anyhow,” M. Goefle added, turning gayly to Jean, whose face amused him, “I beg your pardon, my poor ass, but I don’t feel inclined to keep you so near me. You have a remarkably good voice, and I don’t sleep soundly. I am going to take you to Loki, who will be a warm, comfortable companion; and, for to-night, you will have to share his supper and straw. Come, Nils, come, my child; you must light me to the stable.”

Receiving no reply, M. Goefle was obliged to return to the guard-room and find the child’s hiding-place; pulling him out by one leg, he carried him back and seated him, whether he would or not, upon the back of the ass. At first, Master Nils, thinking that he was astride the imaginary bear, uttered piercing cries. He had never seen an ass, and was as much alarmed by Jean’s long ears as he would have been by the horns of the devil; but gradually the tranquillity and gentleness of the poor beast restored his courage. M. Goefle gave him the candlestick with three branches; he himself led the ass by the halter, and, leaving the tower, they all three turned into the wooden gallery, with its mossy shed, that surrounded the snow-covered court, and proceeded towards the stable.

At this very moment, Ulph came out of the pavilion in which his uncle lived, and proceeded towards the tower, with a lantern in one hand, and in the other a large basket-full of articles for setting the lawyer’s table. Ulph now was as eager to return to the bear-room as, a little while before, he had been unwilling to enter it. This is what had happened to him.

Like a true Swede, Ulph was all kindness and hospitality; but since he had been living in the gloomy chateau of Stollborg, with his deaf and melancholy uncle, the poor fellow had become so superstitious and cowardly that he never failed to lock himself up in his room as soon as the sun went down, with the firm resolution of not admitting any suspicious characters after that hour, but of leaving them rather to perish in the ice and snow. If the outer door of the chateau had not been broken open by Puffo’s vigorous fist, and if Ulph had not recognized the lawyer’s voice in the court, the respectable doctor of laws would certainly have been obliged to return to the new chateau, in spite of his dread of its noise and confusion.

After introducing him into the tower, Ulph became a little more tranquil. He even said to himself that it was all for the best. If M. Goefle wanted to defy the devil it was his own business, and it was far better to have to admit him than to be obliged to reconduct him to the new chateau; an order that would have entailed upon the unfortunate guide the terrible necessity of returning alone over a lake peopled with frightful goblins. The old overseer of Stollborg was delicate, chilly, and accustomed to retire early. Happily, he had already shut himself up in his pavilion, which stood at the end of a small inner court, and which had no view of the outer court, as all its windows overlooked the lake. Whether asleep or not, therefore, it was not at all likely that he would suspect the presence of his guest before the next morning. After reflecting deeply, Ulph resolved not to disturb him, and to do his best to prepare M. Goefle a good supper. Sten himself was very frugal, but he was treated with great consideration by his master, the Baron de Waldemora (proprietor both of the new chateau and the old tower), who, once for all, had given his new steward the strictest orders to provide liberally for this old and faithful servant of his house.

Ulph loved good living, and seeing that his uncle sent back, out of prudence and economy, the superfluous provisions brought from the new chateau, he made arrangements, without telling him anything about it, to receive everything himself. He concealed his gastronomic wealth in a certain mysterious corner of the kitchen, and kept his bottles of old wine, which must have been exceedingly valuable in a country where the vine is a hot-house plant, piled up behind a row of empty hogsheads, in a certain little cellar in the rock, very cool in summer and very warm in winter.

Ulph was not covetous; he was an honest fellow, who would not upon any account have made money out of the baron’s presents. He was good-hearted too, and, whenever he could keep a friend with him, he invited him in a mysterious manner to share his precious bottles; drinking alone is sad, and he was only too happy to be able to enjoy them in company. But it was so well established that the chateau was haunted, not by a bear, as Nils imagined, but by an unhappy ghost, that poor Ulph could not persuade a single boon companion to stop with him a moment after sunset. To keep up his courage, he was obliged to finish his bottles himself; and it was at such times that he beheld the wicked trolls and stroemkarls, who try to lead their victims to waterfalls, and throw them in. It was probably to avoid being tempted to follow them, that the judicious Ulphilas drank until he had entirely lost the use of his legs. There were a number of free-thinkers and cosmopolites who did not believe in anything, among the baron’s numerous suite of servants, but Stenson hated them all more or less, and his nephew Ulphilas shared his antipathies.

Ulphilas Stenson, therefore, had plenty of materials for the doctor’s supper, and he was not a bad hand at frying and roasting. After all, the lawyer’s gayety had inspirited him a little, and he was looking forward to having a pleasant chat while waiting on the table, when his cheerful ideas were suddenly disturbed by strange sounds. He imagined that he heard a stealthy rustling in the thick walls, a creaking in the wainscots! Twenty times the frying-pan fell from his hand, and at one moment he was so sure that his sighs of terror were repeated behind him by a mocking echo, that he remained for three good minutes without daring to breathe, and far less to turn around.

This was what made him so slow in preparing this much-desired repast. At last, when he had finished his work after a fashion, he went down into the cellar to get some wine. There new agonies awaited him. Just as he was about leaving this sanctuary with a sufficient load, a tall black figure glided before him. His lantern went out, and the same mysterious steps that had already frightened him almost out of his wits, went rapidly up the cellar stairs. Ulph came very near fainting; but, recovering his courage, he returned to the kitchen, and leaving his saucepans simmering on the stove, resolved, under the pretence of setting the table, to go and see whether M. Goefle would not cure him of his terror.

It was at this very moment, as he was coming along the wooden gallery with his useful load, that he met face to face a whimsical apparition. There before him he beheld the doctor of laws in his night-cap, leading by the halter a strange, monstrous animal (like a true Dalecarlian peasant of those days, Ulph had never seen the ass, and perhaps had never heard of it), while upon this animal, whose long ears cast gigantic shadows along the gallery, rode a little red devil bearing a triple flame; the very imp whom M. Goefle had wished to pass off as his valet, but who could only be the kobold in person, the familiar demon whom he had boasted of having in his service.

This was too much for poor Ulph. He respected kobolds, but he did not want to see them. His grasp failed; he set his basket on the ground, and, turning short round, fled, and shut himself up in his room, swearing by his eternal salvation that he would not come out again that night, even although the lawyer should die of hunger and the devil should eat up his supper.

It was all in vain that M. Goefle called. He received no reply, and after conducting the ass to the stable, he took up the abandoned basket and returned to set the table, with Nils’s help, in the bear-room.

“Well,” he said, “travellers must be philosophical. Here are glasses, dishes and napkins, so we will hope that that lunatic will provide us with some food as well. We shall have to wait his good pleasure, since there is no means of doing otherwise; and, in the meanwhile, we can open these bottles, which look promising.”

Nils set the table quite neatly, the fire blazed merrily in the stove, and Monsieur Goefle had quite recovered his natural good-humor, when the child began tumbling about in a languid, helpless way, which showed that he had suddenly become sleepy.

“Look out there!” cried the lawyer; “wake up! You have to eat yet; you must be hungry.”

“Oh yes! Monsieur Goefle,” replied the child; “but I want to sleep so much! I can never wait all the while until your supper is brought and you have done eating. Give me a little of this bread and blackberry jam; then I will be stronger, and will wait upon you.”

M. Goefle himself opened the pot of sweetmeats, and Nils seated himself unceremoniously in the place intended for his master, while the latter warmed his feet, which had been chilled by their expedition to the stable. M. Goefle was as active in imagination as fluent in speech. When there was no opportunity for talking, his mind kept busily at work, or he abandoned himself to agreeable reveries. In a little while he began to feel the pangs of hunger again, and turned to see whether Ulph had returned, at last, with some more solid dish than sweetmeats; but he only saw little Nils fast asleep, with his head on the table and his nose in the plate.

“Come, come!” he said, shaking him; “now that you have had something to eat, you must keep awake. I want you to wait upon me. Go and see whether Ulph—”

It was useless for M. Goefle to finish. Nils was overcome by the irresistible sleep of childhood. He got up, but his eyes were vacant, and he staggered like a drunken man. The lawyer really pitied him.

“Well, go to bed,” he said, “since you are good for nothing.”

Nils turned to go to the guard-room, but stopped at the door, and, leaning against it, fell fast asleep standing. He had to be carried to bed. Then there was another trouble. The little man really could not take off his gaiters. M. Goefle had to take off his valet’s gaiters, and this was not an easy task, for the shoes were tight, and the child’s legs were swollen with fatigue.

When he was going to hoist him into his bed, he saw that the little rogue had already crept in, all dressed.

“The devil take you!” he said; “do you suppose I gave you those beautiful new clothes to sleep in? Get up and undress yourself; it is the least you can do.”

He pulled him out of bed, whether he wished it or not, but the child made useless efforts to unbutton himself. Aunt Gertrude, delighted to have full swing in dressing him up like a little valet before introducing him to his master, had had his elk-skin small-clothes and his red cloth vest made so tight, that they fitted him like wax. M. Goefle himself could scarcely pull them off. While thus engaged, he had to take him upon his knees before the fire, for the child was shivering with cold. It was useless for him to get angry, and curse Gertrude for giving him such a servant; he could not be so inhuman as to let him freeze. And then Nils disarmed him by his pretty ways. At every word of reproach, he would reply artlessly:

“You will see to-morrow, Monsieur Goefle: I will do all that you tell me, and then I will love you so much!”

“That will always be the way,” replied the good lawyer, shaking him a little. “I prefer to be rather less loved and a little better waited on.”

At last Nils was in bed, and M. Goefle turned to go in quest of his problematical supper, when the child called him back unceremoniously, and said in a reproachful voice:

“Wait, monsieur; you are not going to leave me all alone!”

“What more?” cried the doctor of laws. “Do you want company to sleep?”

“But, Monsieur Goefle, I never slept alone in my room at the pastor’s house; and here, above all, where I am so afraid. Oh! stop—stop; if you are going to leave me, I had rather sleep on the floor in the room where you are.”

Wide awake now as a cat, Nils jumped out of bed, and started to follow his master into the bear-room, in his shirt. M. Goefle lost all patience. He scolded; Nils took to crying again. He was going to shut him up. Nils began to howl. The doctor of laws formed an heroic determination.

“Since I have been so foolish,” he said, “as to suppose that a child ten years old was fourteen, and to imagine that Gertrude had a grain of common sense in her brain, I must pay the penalty. Five minutes’ patience and this young rogue will be fast asleep; while if I excite him by my opposition, God only knows how long I shall have to hear him groaning or braying.”

He went into the bear-room to get one of his bundles of papers, not without cursing the child, who followed with naked feet, and would scarcely give him time to find his spectacles; and then sat down before the fire in the guard-room, with the doors shut, as it was not very warm. After asking Nils ironically whether he did not want to be sung to sleep, he buried himself in his dusty papers, and forgot all about the supper, which did not arrive, and the child, who was snoring with all his might.

[1] Gevala, Gefle, Gesle, and Goefle, are different ways of writing the name of the same town. The name of the advocate in question happened to be the same as that of the town in which he practised.

[II.]

BUT what was Cristiano about while M. Goefle was meeting with all these adventures? The reader has probably guessed that the mocking goblin wandering about poor Ulph in kitchen and cellar was our adventurer in person, in pursuit of his supper. Ulph’s terrors and agonies enabled him to carry off the most portable dishes in the kitchen, almost under his nose. In the cellar he was less fortunate. On blowing out the coward’s light, he had found himself in such utter darkness that he was afraid of being shut up fasting in this subterranean vault. He had hastened, therefore, to retrace his steps, while consoling himself with the thought that he could seize the bottles which Ulph would be sure to bring up, at a more favorable moment.

The adventurer had lost some little time in cautiously exploring the secret passage of the bear-room, which we shall describe rather later; escaping from it with some difficulty, he introduced himself secretly into M. Stenson’s pavilion, and so had not been in a position to notice M. Goefle’s arrival. He thought, therefore, that the supper was being prepared for the old overseer. Before returning to his self-selected lodging, he had still to find some supper for his ass, and for several moments after Ulph’s final fit of terror, he was wandering about in the small court adjoining the outer enclosure; hence he lost the diverting spectacle of M. Goefle in his night-cap, leading the ass in triumph to the stable, with the help of his kobold in red livery. As he explored the old building in every direction, and opened all the doors that were not firmly bolted, Cristiano came at last to the stable, where he was delighted to see Master Jean eating his supper with a good appetite, and trampling upon a thick litter of dry moss, in company with a handsome black horse, who seemed to make him very welcome.

“Really, beasts are sometimes more reasonable and more hospitable than men,” thought Cristiano, caressing the noble animal. “Since we have been travelling in this cold country, Jean has been regarded with amazement, fear, or repugnance, in the various villages and peasants’ huts where we have stopped, and I myself, in spite of the affable manners of the people of this country, have fallen into a strange den of gloomy or absent-minded beings, where I am obliged to go marauding, like a soldier on a campaign. This good horse, on the contrary, makes room for Jean in his stall, without asking him the meaning of his long ears, and treats him from the start as an equal. Well, Jean, good-night, my friend! If I should ask you who had brought you here and supplied your wants to your heart’s desire, you would not perhaps have the goodness to reply; and I should suppose, if I did not see that some one had tied you by your halter, that you had been sensible enough to come of your own accord. Well, anyhow I will follow your example, and go and take my supper without thinking of the morrow.”

Cristiano shut the stable-door and returned to the bear-room, where he was agreeably surprised to find the table set with handsome dishes, heavy silver, and a white table-cloth, soiled only by a few sweetmeat stains around Nils’s plate.

“Hallo!” cried the adventurer, gayly, “these good people have finished, or rather they have begun with the dessert! But who the devil has been here in my absence? Puffo would not have been neat enough to set the table; that is not at all his style in travelling. Besides, he must have gone to the new chateau to seek his fortune, or I should have met him while exploring the old one. In fact, I never expected to receive any assistance from that fellow. If he has found a comfortable place for himself in some kitchen, no matter where, he will be sure to forget all about me, and I was quite right to take care of myself. But no matter, if he should happen to return here to sleep, the poor devil must not freeze at the door of the chateau.”

Cristiano went and opened the door of the court, which Ulph, after M. Goefle’s arrival, had taken pains to fasten, and returned firmly resolved to have his supper, no matter with whom, by fair means or foul.

“I have a right to it,” he continued; “the dishes are empty, and the food I bring fills them handsomely. If I have a companion here, and he proves good-natured, we will join forces; otherwise we will see which of the two is to turn the other out of doors.”

While talking in this way, Cristiano went to see whether his baggage had been disturbed. He found it in the corner where he had left it, and where it had not been noticed. He then examined M. Goefle’s trunk, valise and effects; his clothes scattered about upon the chairs (the linen carefully folded to be laid away in a closet, and the coats stretched over the backs of the chairs to get smooth); and, last of all, the empty valise, upon the cover of which he read these words:—M. Thormund Goefle, Advocate, Gevala; Doctor of Law, Faculty of Lund.

“An advocate!” thought the adventurer. “Well, he will talk, anyhow! A lawyer must always have a little wit and talent. He may prove an agreeable companion if he is sensible enough not to judge a man by his coat. But where can he be hidden? He is some one, I suppose, invited to the festivities at the Chateau de Waldemora, who, like myself, found the house full, or who fancied stopping in this romantic manor. Or he may be the business man of the rich baron, for it is scarcely likely that citizens are admitted into the society of the nobles in this country of castes and prejudices. It is nothing to me! The lawyer has certainly gone out, in any event. He may be chatting with the old overseer, or perhaps he is in the double-bedded room that we were told about, although I see no signs of a door. Shall I look for him? Who knows that he has not gone to bed? Yes, that is most probable. The people here wished to wait upon him, but he declined everything; contenting himself with sweetmeats, and longing only for his bed. May he sleep in peace, the worthy man! For my part, I shall do very well in this large arm-chair, and if I am cold—hallo! here is a magnificent cloak lined with fur, and a sable travelling cap, that will protect body and ears from the frost. Let me see whether they will be comfortable! Yes, very indeed,” thought Cristiano, throwing the cloak over his shoulders, and donning the cap; “and that is lucky for me! What a strange puzzle life is! When I think that I have followed a respectable profession for ten years, and yet have not a good cloak to cover my poor body, now that I am lost in the polar regions, I can scarcely believe my senses!”

Cristiano had already placed his booty, consisting of an appetizing Hamburg tongue, a bear’s leg smoked to perfection, and a superb piece of smoked and salted salmon, upon the table.

He was just going to throw off the doctor’s travelling suit so as to eat more at his leisure, when he thought he heard the tinkling of bells passing under the only window of the bear-room. This window, which was opposite the stove, was large, and had a double sash, the universal practice in all comfortable dwellings, whether ancient or modern, in northern countries. However, the outside sash showed how Stollborg had been neglected. Almost all the glass panes were broken, and, as the wind had ceased, you could hear distinctly the noises from the outside; the masses of recently fallen snow breaking off from the old solid beds and sinking with a dull, mysterious boom down the perpendicular rocks, the distant shouts proceeding from the farm on the shore of the lake, and the melancholy howling of the dogs, saluting with unintelligible maledictions the red disk of the rising moon.

Cristiano, who felt curious to see the sleigh which was cutting a path over the frozen lake so near his refuge, opened the inner sash and thrust his head through one of the broken panes. He saw distinctly a fantastic vision gliding along at the foot of the rock. Two magnificent white horses, driven by a bearded coachman dressed like a Russian, were drawing lightly a sleigh that flashed and glittered with a shimmering light, like a precious stone. The lantern on this elegant vehicle was unusually high, and looked like a star swept along by a whirlwind, or a will-o’-the-wisp furiously chasing the sleigh. Its light, thrown forward by a reflector of red gold, cast warm gleams across the blue moonlight on the snow, and painted with rainbow hues the vapor streaming from the nostrils and sides of the horses. Nothing could have been more graceful and poetic than this wheelless car, which might have been that of the fairy of the lake, passing like a dream under Cristiano’s dazzled eyes. It is true that he had seen sleighs of all kinds, from the most luxurious to the most simple, in passing through Stockholm and other cities of the country, but none of them had seemed to him so picturesque and so singular as the one now stopping at the foot of the rock. For, he could no longer doubt it, a new visitor, and this time an opulent one, was coming to take possession of Stollborg, or to reconnoitre that silent retreat.

“The sleigh has afforded me a beautiful spectacle,” thought Cristiano; “but the devil take those who are in it! Here, I wager, is another interruption to the peaceful supper I was promising myself.”

The rash imprecation died upon his lips! A sweet and really melodious voice, a woman’s voice, which, according to Cristiano, could only belong to a charming woman, proceeded from the sleigh. The voice, speaking in the dialect of the province, which he did not understand, made this remark:

“Do you think, Peterson, that your horses can ascend to the door of the old chateau?”

“Yes, mademoiselle,” replied the large coachman, muffled up in furs, “this evening’s snow will make it a little troublesome, but others have been before us already. I see the fresh tracks. Don’t be afraid. We will get there.”

The approach to Stollborg, which M. Goefle had called a little rock, was an actual natural staircase, consisting of layers of schistose rock of unequal thickness. In summer it would have been enough to disable horses and carriages; but winter in the north renders every road practicable and every traveller intrepid. A thick bed of frozen snow, solid and smooth as marble, fills up all hollows, and levels all inequalities. The horses, shod for the purpose, climb dangerous heights, and descend boldly the most precipitous declivities; sleighs are not often upset, and accidents, when they do occur, are seldom dangerous. In a few moments this one stopped at the door of the little chateau.

“You must ring cautiously,” said the sweet voice to the coachman; “you know, Peterson, that I don’t want to be seen by the old steward, who, perhaps, tells everything that happens to his master.”

“Oh, he is so deaf!” replied the coachman, jumping to the ground. “Ulph won’t say a word, for he is my friend; provided always that he chooses to open the door. He is a little timid at night, and no wonder, the chateau—”

Peterson was probably going to tell about the ghosts of Stollborg, but he did not have time to continue. The door opened as if of itself, and Cristiano, as well muffled up as the coachman, thanks to the lawyer’s cloak and fur cap, appeared at the threshold.

“No matter, here he is,” said the sweet voice. “Stand aside, Peterson, and don’t forget to take off the bells from your horses; I begged you so particularly to attend to it. Don’t be impatient, poor fellow, I won’t keep you waiting long.”

“Take your time, mademoiselle,” replied the devoted servant, wiping the icicles from his beard, “it is very mild this evening.”

Cristiano did not understand a word of this dialogue, but he listened with none the less delight to the sweet voice, and he offered his arm to a little lady so well wrapped up in ermine, that she looked like a flake of snow rather than a human being. She spoke to him at once, but still in Dalecarlian, so that he could not guess what she said, although it was evident from her intonation, sweet as it was, that she was giving him some orders. She mistook him for the keeper of old Stollborg; and as the voice of command, in all countries alike, requires no other answer than submissive gestures, Cristiano did very well, without understanding and replying, during his short walk with the little lady, whom he conducted along the wooden gallery leading from the door of the court to that of the donjon.

In taking her to the bear-room, Cristiano obeyed instinctively his natural hospitality, without knowing whether she would thank him for his kindness. In the same way he had been led instinctively to go and meet her by curiosity, and perhaps also a sentiment of gallantry, which was still all-powerful at this epoch, over men of all ages and classes.

The young lady, who had followed her guide unsuspiciously, started with surprise when she found herself in the famous room.

“Is this the bear-room?” she said, rather anxiously; “I have never been here.”

Cristiano, who did not understand a word, made no reply; and looking at him by the light of the only candle placed upon the table, she cried, in Swedish:

“Good heavens! This is not Ulphilas! To whom have I the honor of speaking? Can it be M. Goefle in person?”

The young man understood and spoke Swedish remarkably well. He remembered instantly the name upon the lawyer’s valise, and saw—thanks to the disguise of his cloak—that he would be able to amuse himself, if only for a moment, by playing his part. Singular circumstances, that we shall learn about in due time, had given him perfect command of the Swedish language; but he was a stranger in the country. Utterly isolated, and bound by no ties to any human being, he was not obliged to be circumspect in his behavior, and considered it only natural to divert himself whenever he had a chance. He replied boldly, therefore, at a venture:

“Yes, madame, I am Monsieur Goefle, Doctor of Laws of the Faculty of Lund, practising law at Gevala.”

As he spoke, he laid his hand upon a spectacle-case containing a pair of green spectacles, which the lawyer was in the habit of wearing when he travelled, to protect his eyes from the fatiguing glare of the snow. Delighted with this discovery, which the special providence that watches over children and hair-brained mad-caps seemed to have thrust under his very nose, he put them on, and felt perfectly disguised.

“Ah, monsieur,” said the unknown, “I ask a thousand pardons, but I did not see you. I have never had the pleasure of meeting you, and I took you for the keeper of Stollborg. You must have laughed to hear me ordering him to inform you that I requested a moment’s interview, and promising him a fee for so doing.”

Cristiano bowed respectfully.

“Will you allow me, then,” resumed the unknown, “to converse with you about an affair—a little embarrassing—a little delicate?—”

These two words delighted the adventurer to such a degree, that he forgot all about his intense momentary vexation at having his supper delayed by this unexpected visit, and only thought how much he should like to see the face of his visitor, which was buried in her ermine hood.

“I am ready to listen to you,” he said, in a grave tone; “a lawyer is a confessor. But are you not afraid, if you keep on your cloak, that you will catch cold when you go out?”

“No,” said the unknown, accepting the arm-chair which her host offered her, “I am a true mountaineer; I never catch cold.”

She added artlessly:

“Besides, you will think, perhaps, that I am not suitably attired for the conference that I have just solicited with a dignified and respectable person like you, Monsieur Goefle; I am in ball-dress.”

“Good gracious!” cried Cristiano, thoughtlessly; “I am not a ferocious old Lutheran! A ball-dress does not shock me at all; above all, when it is worn by a pretty person.”

“You are very gallant, Monsieur Goefle; but I don’t know that I am pretty and well-dressed; I do know, however, that I ought not to hide my face from you, for any distrust upon my part would be an insult to your loyalty, to which, in requesting your advice and protection, I have just made appeal.”

The unknown threw back her hood, and Cristiano saw the most charming head imaginable. It was a pure Swedish type, eyes of a true sapphire blue, quantities of light golden hair of extreme fineness, one of those exquisitely pure and fresh complexions which are never seen in equal perfection among other races; and, just visible through the half open pelisse, a slender neck, shoulders of snow, and a slight, flexible form. This sweet vision was chaste as infancy, for the little visitor was only sixteen years old, and had not done growing.

Cristiano did not pride himself upon his austerity; he was a man of his time, but he was superior to the hazardous career into which he had been thrown by circumstances. He was a person of intelligence and natural delicacy. He gazed with quiet friendliness upon this Rose of the North; and, if he had had any treacherous idea in drawing her into this bear’s den, it was quickly replaced by the anticipation of an adventure which, however gay and romantic, could not fail to be as honest as the amiable and frank countenance of his young guest.

“Monsieur Goefle,” resumed the latter, encouraged by the respectful attitude of the pretended lawyer, “now that you have seen my face, which I hope is not that of a wicked person, I must tell you my name. You will know it perfectly well. But it distresses me to see you standing, when I am seated upon the only arm-chair in the room. I know the respect that is due to a man of your worth—I was going to say of your age, for I have always thought (I don’t know why) that you were very old; while, on the contrary, you seem younger than the baron.”

“You flatter me,” replied Cristiano, pulling his furred cap, with its ear-pieces, down over his eyes and cheeks; “I am old, very old! It is only the tip of my nose that can appear young, and you must excuse me for not uncovering in your presence. Your visit surprised me; I had taken off my wig, and must hide my bald crown as I can.”

“Don’t speak of it, Monsieur Goefle, and please to sit down.”

“With your permission I will remain standing near the stove, on account of my gout, which pains me,” replied Cristiano, who was standing with his head in the shadow, while the feeble light of the only candle was thrown entirely upon his visitor. “To whom have I the honor—”

“Yes, yes,” she replied eagerly. “Oh! you know me well, although you have never seen me. I am Margaret.”

“Indeed!” cried Cristiano, in a tone that signified, “I know no more than I did before.”

Happily, the young girl was impatient to explain herself.

“Yes, yes,” she replied, “Margaret Elveda, the niece of your client.”

“Ah, the niece of my client—”

“Countess Elveda, sister of my father, the colonel, who was the friend of the unhappy baron!”

“The unhappy baron—”

“Ah, mon Dieu! Baron Adelstan, whose name I cannot pronounce without emotion in this room, who was assassinated by the miners of Falun—or by some one else! for, after all, monsieur, who knows? Are you very certain that it was done by the workmen of the mine?”

“As to that, mademoiselle, I cannot say; if any one has a right to swear upon his honor that he does not know anything about it, it is your humble servant,” replied Cristiano, in an impressive tone, that seemed forcibly to strike the young girl, who gave his words her own interpretation.

“Oh, Monsieur Goefle,” she said earnestly, “I was perfectly sure that you shared my suspicions. No nothing will ever persuade me that all these tragic deaths that were talked about, and which are still talked about, in whispers—but are we quite alone? can no one overhear us? This is such a serious matter, Monsieur Goefle!”

“In fact it seems serious,” thought Cristiano, assuming the tottering gait of an old man, and going to see whether the outside door was shut; “the only trouble is that I don’t understand it all.”

He glanced around the room, but failed, as before, to notice the door of the guard-chamber, which was closed between M. Goefle and our two friends.

“Well, monsieur,” resumed the young lady, “can you believe that my aunt wants to make me marry a man whom I cannot help regarding as the assassin of his family?”

As Cristiano knew nothing at all about the facts in question, he tried to draw out an explanation by chiming in with the views of his new client.

“Your aunt must be a mad-woman,” he said, a little cavalierly, “or something worse.”

“Excuse me, Monsieur Goefle, she is my aunt, and it is my duty to respect her! I only accuse her of being blind or prejudiced.”

“Blindness and prejudice be it then; it is really a matter of no importance. What I see most clearly is, that she is trying to force your inclination.”

“Oh! there is no doubt about that, for I have a horror of the baron! Did she not tell you so?”

“Quite the contrary! I supposed—”

“Oh, Monsieur Goefle, how could you suppose that I, at my age, would feel the least liking for a man fifty-five years old?”

“What! Is the person they want you to marry fifty-five years old into the bargain?”

“You are only pretending to be in doubt, Monsieur Goefle! You cannot help knowing his age; you are his lawyer, and, it is said, also his devoted friend—but I don’t believe that at all.”

“The deuce! You are right. May I be hung if I care a fig for him! But what is the name of the gentleman?”

“The baron? You do not know whom I am talking of?”

“How should I? There are so many barons in the world.”

“But my aunt has told you—”

“A truce to what she has told me! How can I remember all that your aunt says? She doesn’t know her own mind, perhaps.”

“Oh, pardon me; she knows it only too well! She has a will of iron. She must have told you about her plans, for she declares that you approve them.”

“I approve of sacrificing a charming child like you to a dotard?”

“There now, you see that you know the baron’s age perfectly well.”

“But once again, what baron do you mean?”

“What baron? Is it possible that it can be necessary for me to mention the Snow Man?”

“Indeed! The Snow Man? Very well, I must confess that I am no wiser than I was before.”

“How, Monsieur Goefle, you do not know the surname of the most powerful, the richest, and at the same time the most wicked and hateful of your clients, the Baron Olaus de Waldemora?”

“What, the proprietor of this chateau?”

“Certainly, and of the new chateau on the other shore of the lake; the owner, moreover, of innumerable iron mines, lead mines, and alum mines, and of several valleys, forests and mountains, without referring to his fields, cattle, farms and lakes; the seigneur, in a word, of a good tenth part of Dalecarlia. It is because of his vast possessions that my aunt is at me, from morning until night, to make me forget that he is old, sickly, and perhaps burdened with crimes.”

“Good God!” cried Cristiano, in amazement, “I have accepted the hospitality of an agreeable person!”

“You are laughing at me, Monsieur Goefle! You don’t believe in his guilt, and you were jesting when you said just now—”

“All that I said I am ready to repeat. But I should like to know of what crimes you accuse my host?”

“I don’t accuse him; public rumor has accustomed me to regard him as the assassin of his father, his brother, and his sister-in law, the unhappy Hilda—”

“Nothing more than that?”

“You know what is said, Monsieur Goefle; you were commissioned, were you not?—Oh, no, it must have been your father, who was Baron Olaus’s lawyer at that time. The baron brought forward deeds of some sort. Nothing could ever be proved against him; but the truth was never known, and never will be known,—at least until the dead come from the tomb to tell it.”

“That sometimes happens,” replied Cristiano, smiling.

“Really, do you believe?—”

“Oh, that is one of our professional phrases, when an unexpected proof is discovered, you know—a lost letter, a chance word, long forgotten.”

“Yes, I know, but nothing was ever found, and for fifteen or twenty years the whole thing has been buried in silence and forgetfulness. Baron Olaus was suspected and hated at first, but he has succeeded in making himself feared, and that tells the whole story. At present, he carries his presumption and confidence so far that he wishes to marry again. Ah! may God preserve me from being the object of his pursuit! It is said that he loved his wife devotedly; but as for the Baroness Hilda, it is generally believed—”

“What is believed?”

“I see that these peasant’s stories have never reached you, Monsieur Goefle, or else you laugh at them, since you have quietly taken up your quarters in this room.”

“In fact there is some story connected with it,” replied Cristiano, as a remark that he had recently heard flashed into his mind. “The people at the farm said to me this evening,—‘Go there, and let us know in the morning how you passed the night.’ The room is haunted, then, by a goblin—a ghost—”

“There must be something strange here, whether a phantom or a real being, for old M. Stenson himself believes so, and the baron also, perhaps. It is said that he has never entered the room since his sister-in-law’s death, and he has had a certain door walled up—”

“Yonder,” said Cristiano, pointing to the top of the staircase.

“It is possible,” replied Margaret, “I don’t know. It is all very mysterious, and I thought you would be well informed about matters that I am ignorant of. I don’t believe in ghosts. Still, I shouldn’t like to see one, and nothing in the world would induce me to sleep here, as you are going to do. As for the baron, whether the story of the diamond ring is true or false—”

“What! another story—”

“Yes, and the most improbable one of all, I confess; I cannot help laughing as I repeat it. They say, in the cottages of the neighborhood, that the baron loved his wife—who was as wicked himself—so well, that he gave her body, when she died, to an alchemist, who reduced it in an alembic, and turned it into a great black diamond. It is certain, at any rate, that he wears a strange ring upon his finger, which I cannot look at without terror and disgust.”

“That is a good proof!” said Cristiano, laughing; “but only think if a similar fate should be reserved for you. They would find nothing, I know, in the alembic where you were baked, but a pretty rose diamond of the purest water, but that would not be any more cheerful for you, and I advise you not to run the risk of being crystallized.”

Margaret burst out laughing, but it frightened her to hear her fresh, childlike voice echoed mysteriously through the old room. She became sad, and said in a tone of discouragement:

“Well, enough of that! I see, Monsieur Goefle, that you are an amiable and witty man, as every one says; but I was very much mistaken in supposing that you would sympathize with me, and would be my guide and protector. You agree with my aunt, you consider all I have told you a mere dream, and you reject the cry of my heart. May God have pity upon me! I have no longer any hope but in Him.”

“Wait a little!” replied Cristiano, moved to see great tears rolling over rosy cheeks which had just been so smiling. “Why don’t you depend more upon yourself? What have you told me, after all? You announce that you have a confession to make of a delicate nature and all it amounts to is that your friends wish you to marry a man who does not please you, and towards whom you feel an antipathy. I thought you were going to confide some love affair to me. You need not blush at that. A love may be pure and honorable, even although ambitious parents disapprove of it. A father and mother may be mistaken, and yet it is painful to resist their influence. You are an orphan! Yes, you must be, since you are dependent upon an old aunt—I call her old, and you shake your head! Assume that she is young—she claims to be so, no doubt, and I, it seems, am no longer a judge, for I considered her old. If she is young, she ought all the more to be sent—I will not say to mind her own business, but to reflect to some purpose, while you ask the advice of some old friend, M. Goefle, for instance—that is to say, myself—some one, in a word, who can put you in a way to marry the happy mortal whom you prefer.”

“But I assure you, dear M. Goefle, that I do not love any one,” replied Margaret. “Oh God! it would only need that to complete my misfortunes! It is quite enough to be obliged to endure the importunities of a person you hate.”

“You are not sincere, my dear child,” replied Cristiano, who was playing his part so well and naturally that he really was beginning to feel as if he were M. Goefle in person; “you are afraid that I will repeat what you confide to me to the countess, my client.”

“Oh, no, no, dear Monsieur Goefle, it is not so, indeed! I know that you are both honorable and kind-hearted. Every one considers you so, and even the baron, who thinks ill of every one else, dares not say a word against you. Such is my respect for you, my confidence in you, that I have been watching for your arrival at Waldemora; and I must tell you how the idea of seeking you in this way occurred to me: this will give you my whole history in a few words, and I don’t believe my aunt has related it very accurately.

“I was brought up in Chateau Dalby, in Woermland, twenty leagues distant, under the eyes of my guardian, Countess Elfride d’Elveda, my father’s sister. When I say under her eyes, you know what I mean! My aunt loves society and politics. She accompanies the court to Stockholm, and is much more interested in the affairs of the Diet than in taking care of me. So, all my life, I have lived in a rather gloomy chateau with my French governess, Mademoiselle Potin, who, fortunately, is very kind, and who loves me dearly. My aunt makes us a visit twice a year, to see whether I have grown, whether I am speaking French and Russian well, whether I am in want of anything, and whether the pastor of our church, who is very strict, takes good care that we do not receive any visits besides his own, and those of his family.”

“Well, really, that is not very amusing!”

“No; but I have no cause to consider myself unhappy. I study a good deal with my governess, I am quite rich, and my aunt is quite generous, so that I have everything I want; and when the time seems a little long to us, we read novels;—oh, such good and beautiful novels, that make us forget our solitude, and whose moral always is that crime is punished and virtue rewarded!”

“You may be sure of that! At all events, there is no harm in believing it, and behaving accordingly. But there must have been some hero of all this solitude, and of all these romances; did no handsome young fellow, in spite of pastor or aunt, contrive to glide into the house, or at least into your heart?”

“Oh! no, never, I assure you, Monsieur Goefle!” replied Margaret, frankly. “But when my aunt told me suddenly eight days ago that she had selected a husband for me, I will confess that I formed a certain ideal of what he would be like; and when she pointed out Baron Olaus de Waldemora, and said,—‘There he is, be amiable,’ he was so different from what I expected, that I was not amiable at all.”

“I can understand that. And then, your aunt?”

“Oh, she laughed at me! ‘You are a simpleton,’ she said. ‘Girls of rank have no business to think anything about love. They are not expected to marry for love, but to secure a brilliant position. I intend you to be Baroness de Waldemora; otherwise, I declare that you shall remain a prisoner all your life in this chateau, without seeing a living soul. I will do more: I will dismiss Mademoiselle Potin, who looks as if she gave you bad advice. Choose;—I give you a month to decide. The baron has invited us to spend the Christmas festivities[2] at his splendid residence in Dalecarlia. It will be very gay there; hunts, balls, entertainments of all sorts will be going on from morning until night. You will be able to form an idea of his wealth, his influence, his power, and you will acknowledge that you can never hope to make a more brilliant or a more honorable marriage.’”

“And so you said yes?”

“I said yes, that I would come to Dalecarlia, since she gave me a month for reflection. I was glad enough to see a new country, to go to entertainments; in a word, to see a few human beings. But we have been here now for eight days, and I give you my word, Monsieur Goefle, that I consider the baron still more disagreeable than the first day I saw him.”

“But you will meet at his house—if you have not done so already—some one less disagreeable, to whom you will open your heart, as you are now doing, and who will inspire you with a hope of happiness, a courage to resist tyranny, that will help you a great deal more than the advice of an old lawyer.”

“No, Monsieur Goefle, I shall open my heart to no one but you, and I certainly shall not confide in the persons I may happen to meet at the Chateau de Waldemora. I can see plainly that the baron’s guests are people whom he has helped, or who need his help; servile or ambitious, they fear or flatter him, and all of them (except a few excellent young people whom I am very friendly with) bow down before me as if I were already the wife of their patron! I hate and despise these provincial courtiers, but I have faith in you, M. Goefle! You are the baron’s businessman, but you are not his vassal. Your pride and independence are well known. You see that my aunt did not succeed in deceiving me. She told me that you would agree with her in everything, that you would treat my romantic dreams with scorn and contempt, and would even persecute me on account of them; but we heard a very different story from the brother of Mademoiselle Potin, who is tutor in a family in your province, and who knows you intimately. You know who I mean—M. Jacques Potin, whom you have done so much for.”

“Yes, yes, a charming fellow!”

“Charming! no! He is hump-backed!”

“Charming in character! His hump has nothing to do with that.”

“That is true; he is a distinguished man, and he has told us so much good of you, that I resolved to see you without letting my aunt know it. Mademoiselle Potin—who is a capital hand at finding out what is going on—learned the day and hour when you were expected at the new chateau; and, as she was watching for your arrival, she heard at once that you had gone to stop at Stollborg, because the new chateau was too full. With a look she told me all, just as I was completing my toilet, with my aunt’s assistance. My aunt had still her own toilet to make, and as this always takes her two hours, at least, she went to her own room. Mademoiselle Potin remained in mine, to make some excuse in case the countess should send for me, while I slipped down a private staircase to the shore of the lake, where Potin had told my faithful Peterson to wait for me with the sleigh, and here I am! But there are the fanfares at the new chateau, announcing the opening of the ball. I must run away as quickly as possible. And then that poor coachman must be frozen with waiting so long. Adieu, Monsieur Goefle! will you allow me to return to-morrow, while my aunt is taking a nap? She always dances a great deal, and gets very tired at a ball, and I can come perfectly well, while I am walking with my governess.”

“Besides, if your aunt is angry,” said Cristiano, in rather too young a tone, “you can tell her that I am lecturing you, just as she would like to have me.”

“No,” said Margaret, with an instinctive feeling of distrust, “I do not want to turn her into ridicule; and it will, perhaps, be as well for me not to return. If you will promise me to make her abandon this horrible marriage, I shall not need to trouble you with my anxiety.”

“I promise to interest myself in you,” replied Cristiano, more guardedly, “as if you were my own daughter; but you must keep me informed as to the success of my efforts.”

“Then I will return. How good you are, Monsieur Goefle, and how grateful I ought to be to you. Oh, I was quite right in saying that you would be my good angel!”

Margaret spoke warmly; and rising, held out her little hands to the pretended old man, who kissed them most respectfully, while gazing for a moment upon the ravishing little countess in her pale rose-colored satin, trimmed with down. He helped her, in the most fatherly way, to clasp her ermine pelisse, and put on her hood without crushing the ribbons and flowers of her coiffure, and then escorted her back to the sleigh, amid whose eider-down cushions she disappeared like a swan in its nest.

The sleigh flew off, leaving a luminous track along the ice, and was lost to sight behind the rocks along the shore before Cristiano, who remained standing on the steep cliffs of Stollborg, had thought either of the piercing cold or of his devouring hunger.

The fact is that the young adventurer, besides being a good deal agitated (of this he took no note), was spellbound by a wonderful spectacle. The bourrasque, completely lulled, had been succeeded by a strong west wind (this wind brings clear weather in the north, although it has an opposite effect in other climates), which had swept the clouds from the sky in a few seconds. The stars were shining with far more brilliancy than in southern countries. Cristiano felt as if he had never seen them before. They looked literally like suns; and the crescent moon also, in proportion as it arose in the purified atmosphere, poured forth a powerful radiance, which, in any other region, would have been super-planetary. The night, already so clear, was made still brighter by the light reflected from the snow and ice, and the grand features of the landscape were as sharply defined in the transparent atmosphere as in a silver dawn.

These features were sublime. Granite mountains, with their angular peaks covered with eternal snows, shut in a narrow horizon, open only along the valley towards the south-west. The level surfaces and details were a little obscured, but the general outline of the picture was brought out with perfect distinctness by the immense side vault of the blue sky left uncovered by the break in the granite chain. Cristiano, who may be said to have groped his way to Stollborg through whirlwinds of snow, knew the points of the compass well enough to understand that he had come by this gently undulating valley, and he formed a very correct idea of the direction of the gorges of Falun. This was the station where he had breakfasted in the morning, while M. Goefle, whose horse was strong and swift, had stopped there at a later hour and for a longer time.

The valley, or rather the chain of narrow valleys leading from Falun to the Chateau de Waldemora, came to an end abruptly in this place, in an apparent cul-de-sac, an irregular amphitheatre of lofty summits formed by one of the spurs of the Sevenberg chain (otherwise the mountains of Seves, or Sevons), which separates central Sweden from the southern part of Norway. Two fierce torrents descend from the heights of Sevenberg, from the north-west to the south-east, follow the chain to the right and to the left, and rush, in proportion as it lowers, the one towards the Baltic and the other towards Lake Wener and the Kattegat. These two torrents, which gradually become rivers, are the Dala and the Klara; or, as we say, the Dal and the Klar.

Stollborg stood upon a small rocky island, in the centre of one of the little lakes formed by the Klar, or by one of its rapid branches. The reader will not care for minute geographical details, but we can describe the principal characteristics of the landscape with sufficient accuracy. It was a scene of wild and savage desolation; the mountains shone in the limpid night like a group of crystal fortresses built at unequal heights, in the boldest and most capricious manner; snowy granite peaks shut in three-quarters of the horizon; a lower range of snowy mica-schist peaks assumed forms less grand and more fantastic; while everywhere a thousand frozen waterfalls hung motionless in diamond needles along the rocks. These silent cascades all converged towards the main stream, which was also imprisoned by the ice, and welded, as it were, to the lake, whose shores could only be traced by the debris and sharp peaks of naked stone whose black flanks the winter had not been able to cover with its white uniform hue.

“I have often been told,” thought Cristiano, “that these severe northern nights reveal unheard-of splendors, both to the eye and imagination. If I should return to Naples and should tell them that their nights appeal only to the senses, and that he who has not seen winter upon his throne of frost cannot form the least idea of the wonders of the divine work, I should probably be insulted or stoned. What then? There is beauty everywhere under heaven, and he who feels that beauty keenly, will always perhaps find the last impression the most satisfactory and inspiring. Yes, this must really be sublime, for here I am forgetting the cold, which I thought I should never be able to endure, and finding a sort of pleasure even in breathing this air that goes through you like a knife. I must certainly go to Lapland, although Puffo forsakes me, and poor Jean perishes in the snow. I want to see a night twenty-four hours long, and the pale glimmer of noon in the month of January. I should have no success in that country, but my moderate earnings here will enable me travel like a great lord, that is to say, alone and on foot, with nothing to do but to see and enjoy the fine flower of life, novelty, the quality that distinguishes desire from lassitude, dream from memory.”

Eager and imaginative, the young man gazed far away into the circle of high mountains, in search of the invisible route that he would have to take in going to the north, or entering Norway. In fancy he already saw himself reclining upon the edge of fearful abysses, while, to the amazement of the old Scandinavian echoes, he sang some foolish tarantelle, when the music of a distant orchestra struck upon his ear, and he recognized the distant refrain of an old-fashioned French song, probably very new among the Dalecarlians. The music was at the new chateau, where Baron Olaus was giving a ball to his country neighbors in honor of the charming Margaret Elveda.

Cristiano recalled his wandering thoughts. A moment before he had been ready to fly to the North Cape; now his curiosity, thoughts, aspirations, were all directed to the brilliant chateau, glittering on the shore of the lake, and seeming to exhale whiffs of artificial heat into the atmosphere.

“One thing is certain,” he said, “I would not for five hundred crowns (and God only knows how much I need five hundred crowns) quit this strange country to-night, even to be transported by the walkyries to the sapphire palace of the great Odin. To-morrow I shall see this blond fairy again, this descendant of Harold the Fair-haired! To-morrow?—no, indeed, nothing of the kind! I shall not see her again to-morrow; I shall never see her again! To-morrow, the fortunate mortal who has a legitimate right to the sweet name of Goefle will go to the new chateau to confer with his client, and labor with her perhaps, like a genuine heartless business man, to bring about the marriage of the ferocious Olaus and sweet Margaret. To-morrow sweet Margaret will know she has been deceived, and by whom? With what anger, what scorn will she reward my good behavior and wise advice! But all that does not prevent me from feeling hungry, and from being obliged to acknowledge that this December night, between sixty-one and sixty-two degrees of latitude, is rather cool. It makes me think of the time when I used to complain about the winter in Rome!”

Cristiano was returning to the bear-room, when he thought he would give a charitable look at his ass. As he entered the stable, he noticed, for the first time, M. Goefle’s sleigh, which was standing in the coach-house. Why, at the sight of this sleigh, the mind of the adventurer, should have leaped suddenly to a mad resolution, we cannot explain; but, on regaining his comfortable lodging, instead of sitting down quietly to supper with his back to the stove, it is certain that he began to contemplate the full black suit which the doctor of laws had hung over the back of a chair.

Cristiano would have sworn that the grave individual whom he had ventured to imitate was old-fashioned, and perhaps rather shabby in his dress. Not at all. M. Goefle, who had been quite handsome in his youth, dressed remarkably well, was careful of his person, and made it a point of honor to appear in a simple but tasteful costume, doing full justice to his good leg, and still erect and well-formed figure. Cristiano put on the coat, which fitted him like a glove. He found the powder-box and puff, and threw a light cloud over his thick, black hair. The silk stockings were rather tight in the calf, and the shoes with buckles rather large; but what of that! were the Dalecarlians so very critical? In short, in ten minutes the young man was attired like a respectable member of society; a professor of some science, a student in some learned faculty, or member of a dignified profession! No matter what his standing, his figure, at all events, was charming, and his costume irreproachable.

The reader can guess that the adventurer led M. Goefle’s horse from the stable, after begging Jean not to feel lonely; that he harnessed the docile Loki to the sleigh, lighted the lantern, and darted like an arrow down the steep road of Stollborg.

In about ten minutes, he entered the brilliantly lighted court of the new chateau, threw the reins carelessly to the servants in livery, who hastened forward at the sound of the sleigh-bells, and ran up the great front steps of the elegant mansion four steps at a time.

[2] The Christmas festivities in Sweden and Norway last from the twenty-fourth of December to the sixth of January.

[III.]

CRISTIANO was acting as we do in certain dreams, when we feel drawn on to accomplish some improbable thing without being able to tell how. Were not all his surroundings utterly improbable? This fantastic chateau, called the new chateau, in opposition to the ruin of Stollborg, but dating back, in reality, to the time of Queen Catherine, and which, with its splendor and gayety, seemed to have fallen from the clouds into the bosom of a savage desert; these avenues of naked rock and furious waters, over which, thanks to the winter, elegant equipages made their way without difficulty, although it seemed as if they must be utterly impassable; the rows of lights outlining against the darkness the principal walls with their thick towers, crowned with coppered roofs surmounted by huge spires; the main building long, irregularly flanked with square pavilions, and finished off with gigantic gables notched with statues and emblems; the great clock in the central pavilion, which was striking ten o’clock at night,—an hour when the very bears are afraid to stir the snow where they lie cowering, but when man, the most delicate animal of creation, dances in silk stockings with bare-shouldered women; everything in the savage grandeur of the situation and the courtly scene filling it with animation, even to the playful and quaint harmony of the old-fashioned French music blending unceremoniously with the sharp whistling of the wind in the long corridors;—all this seemed made to astonish a traveller, and confuse the ideas of an Italian.

As he gazed upon the immense saloons, and long gallery painted with mythological divinities, and full of company and noise, Cristiano asked himself whether these people were not phantoms conjured up in mockery by the sorcerers of this solitary place. Whence had they come, with their antiquated dresses, these men in spangled coats, these women with powdered hair, smiling through clouds of feathers and laces? Would not this magical chateau disappear at the stroke of a wand? these gay dancers of the minuet and chaconne, would they not fly away in the shape of white eagles or wild swans?

Cristiano had already noticed, however, the national peculiarities of the Swedes; the adventurous isolation of their dwellings, the enormous distances separating them from the little settlements honored by the name of village; the straggling appearance of the villages themselves, which sometimes extend over two or three leagues with only one common centre—the parish church, with its green dome; the contempt of the nobility for cities, which they abandon entirely to the trading portion of the community; in a word, their passion for a lonely country life, united, singularly enough, to a passion for wild, extravagant expeditions, undertaken for the sake of enjoying sudden and apparently impossible social gatherings. Cristiano had been invited to a country merry-making, but he had not foreseen that these characteristic instincts of the Swedes would be made more active by the severity of the climate, the length of the nights, and the apparent difficulty of holding communication with each other. This, however, was a natural consequence of the necessity that man always feels to conquer nature, and turn the compensations that she offers him to account. For two months the baron had given notice for fifty leagues around, that he would entertain the nobility of the country during the Christmas festivities. The baron was neither esteemed nor loved by any one; and yet, for a number of days, his chateau had been full of eager guests, who, coming from all the four points of the compass, had crossed lakes, rivers, and mountains, to attend his summons.

Hospitality is proverbial in Dalecarlia, and, like the love of the people for a country life united to their love of pleasure, it increases in proportion as they live in remote and inaccessible regions. Cristiano, who had noticed with what wonderful kindness strangers are received in Sweden—above all, when they speak the language—had scarcely thought how difficult it might prove to gain admission to a soirée where he knew no one, especially since he had not been invited. He was unpleasantly reminded of his oversight by seeing a sort of major-domo, wearing a sword, who came up to him in the hall, and held out his hand with the utmost politeness, after bowing respectfully.

At first Cristiano was going to shake hands with him kindly, under the supposition that it was a custom of the country to welcome people in this way, but he reflected that he might be asking him to produce his invitation. The major-domo was old, ugly, and pock-marked; his eyes were downcast, and their hypocritical expression was poorly disguised by an affectation of gentle apathy. Cristiano put his hand into his vest pocket, although certain of not finding what he wanted. It is true that he had been invited to visit Waldemora at the expense of his host, but not upon the same footing with the gentlemen of the country. He was preparing, therefore, to play the part of a man who has forgotten his card of admission, and who is disposed to return in search of it, with the privilege of not making his appearance again, when he found in his pocket—that is in M. Goefle’s pocket—a letter signed by the baron, which proved to be a regular invitation for the honorable M. Goefle and family, this being the usual formula. As soon as Cristiano saw what it was, he handed it boldly to the major-domo, who read it at a glance.

“Monsieur is the relative of M. Goefle?” he said, putting the letter into a basket with a great many others.

“Of course!” replied Cristiano, with assurance.

M. Johan (this was the name of the major-domo) bowed again, and opened a door upon the main staircase, where the guests stopping at the chateau were coming and going, as well as the neighbors, who, as they were perfectly well known to the servants of the house, were allowed to enter freely. Cristiano’s introduction was confined to this simple formality, which he would have been very glad to dispense with, for he did not propose to take any direct part in the entertainment, but wanted merely to have a general view of it, and enjoy the satisfaction of seeing the charming Margaret.

He entered, first, the long frescoed gallery that traversed the whole of the main building, and which was decorated with passable success, in imitation of the Italian taste, introduced into Sweden by Queen Christina. The pictures were not good, but they were effective. They represented hunting scenes; and though an artist could not have failed to criticise the drawing and action of the dogs, horses, and wild animals, he could at least have enjoyed the general effect of the brilliant and lively coloring.

Cristiano walked along this gallery until he came to a handsome saloon, where they were beginning to dance. His only thought in looking at the ladies taking part was of Margaret, but his desire to see her was blended with a secret anxiety. How should he renew the conversation begun at Stollborg? how substitute his own character? or, at all events, some new character, no matter what, for the one he had assumed? This no longer appeared to him so easy as he had imagined it would prove on engaging in this wild adventure. He was almost glad to find that Margaret was not in the ball-room; and he took advantage of this respite—for so he felt it to be—to try and form an idea of the company moving before him.

Contrary to his expectation, he found nothing to wonder at. At a first glance, this gathering had none of the peculiarities that he had anticipated. The age, at this period, belonged to Voltaire, and consequently to France. Like most of the European sovereigns, the upper classes in almost every part of Europe had adopted the language, and apparently the philosophical and literary ideas of France. But, as taste, logic, and discernment are always confined to the select few, this infatuation for our ideas gave rise to a great many inconsistencies. For example, the customs and manners of foreign nations reproduced much more frequently the corruption and effeminacy of Versailles than the studious leisure of Ferney. France was the fashion as well as philosophy. Arts, customs, monuments, good breeding, deportment, conduct, were all copied, with more or less success, from the prevailing French fashion. France, with all her contradictory qualities, good and bad, magnificent and petty, noble and contemptible, was accepted indiscriminately. It was one of those characteristic epochs, when progress and decay shake hands before joining in deadly conflict.

The ball given by Baron Olaus was a mere imitation, a little behind the times, of a French reunion of the eighteenth century; and yet the baron hated France, and was intriguing in the interest of Russia. But in Russia also they imitated France, and spoke the French language; at court they were extremely barbarous, and even ferocious in their manners, and yet they were trying to adopt the gallant manners and intellectual refinement of French civilization. Baron Olaus, therefore, was borne along by the irresistible current of the age. We shall learn his history later. Let us return now to Cristiano.

After looking for a while at the dresses of the ladies, which seemed to him only a few years behind French fashions, and at their faces, which were generally sweet and intelligent, although they were not all young and beautiful, he turned his attention to the gentlemen, and tried to recognize, that is to say to guess among them, the face and figure of the master of the house. Not far from the spot where he was observing all that went on without making himself conspicuous, two men were talking in a low voice, with their backs towards him. Involuntarily Cristiano followed their conversation, although he felt no personal interest in it.

These two men were talking French, one with a Russian, and the other with a Swedish accent. The language of courts and diplomacy seemed to be necessary to enable them to exchange their ideas.

“Pshaw!” said the Swede, “I am not a cap any more than a hat, although I am thought to be at the head of a certain faction of the thickest cotton caps in the Diet. I laugh at them all alike, as a matter of fact; you understand very little about Sweden, if you think more of one than of the others.”

“I know it,” replied the Russian; “they sell their votes to the highest bidder.”

“Bid, then! You have no other policy. It is simple, and for you easy, since yours is a rich government. I am with you heart and soul, without any question of recompense. With me it is a matter of conviction.”

“I know you are not one of those patriots of the golden age, who are dreaming about the Scandinavian union, and that one can always come to an understanding with you. The empress relies upon you, but you need not hope to avoid her liberality; she accepts no service without rewarding it magnificently.”

“I am aware of it,” replied the Swede, with a brutality that struck Cristiano; “I have learned it from experience. Long live the great Catherine! If she wants to put us in her pocket, let her do it; I shall be the last one to offer any opposition. If she will only rid us of all these foolish doctrines about the rights and liberty of the peasants—which are our curse—she will be doing a good work. The citizens and noblemen who are their leaders, ought to be arrested, and have respectively a good taste of the knout, and a good dose of Siberia administered to them. As for our worthy king, if his bishopric is restored to him, and, above all, if he gets rid of his wife, he will have nothing to complain of.”

“Don’t speak so loud,” replied the Russian, “some one may be listening without seeming to.”

“There is no danger. Every one here pretends to speak French, but there are not ten persons out of a hundred who can understand it. Besides, what I have just said, I am in the habit of saying freely. I discovered long ago that it is the best policy to make your opinions feared. For my part, I shout upon the housetops that Sweden is done for. Let those who object prove the contrary.”

Although Cristiano did not belong to any nation, although he knew nothing either of his country or family, he felt indignant to hear a Swede so impudently selling his nationality, and he tried to see the features of the man who could talk so; but his attention was suddenly diverted by the bustling, awkward approach of an eccentric individual, who was running about from group to group with the activity of a man who is taking pains to do the honors of the entertainment. This individual was dressed in a gaudy red coat, very richly embroidered, and decorated with the Swedish order of the polar star. His wig was frizzed magnificently, in the very worst style, and was much too high for the fashion; while his enormous cuffs of superb lace were more suggestive of luxury than neatness. In other respects he was old, ugly, petulant, and whimsical; slightly hump-backed, very lame, and completely cross-eyed. This last defect gave him, at a first glance, a wicked expression, and Cristiano concluded that this disagreeable original must be one and the same person with Margaret’s absurd and hateful suitor.

To avoid being obliged to introduce himself, and keep up his pretended relationship with M. Goefle, whose name he had assumed unscrupulously and without danger in his interview with the major-domo, Cristiano prudently withdrew. He resolved now to go from room to room until he had seen the young countess, even if he should be obliged to retire immediately, without speaking to her. He imagined that the hump-backed chatelain had looked at him with a good deal of curiosity, but he made his way skilfully through a group of persons who were talking near a door, and flattered himself that he had escaped in time.

He walked along for several minutes, not exactly in a crowd (the place was so large that the guests did not look very numerous), but amid lively groups, which he did not have leisure to observe attentively. Fearing to be questioned before he could find Margaret, he passed with a preoccupied manner and proud expression—which he assumed all the more because he felt his audacity ready to fail him. And yet, whether from curiosity about a guest that no one knew, or because of their admiration for his fine presence and remarkable face, people everywhere seemed inclined to speak to him, or at least to receive his advances favorably. But Cristiano was feeling a sort of vertigo that made him misunderstand the affable glances and good-humored smiles that were bestowed upon him. He hurried along, therefore, without pretending to disguise that he was seeking some one; to the persons who made way before him, he bowed with an easy grace that was natural to him, but without daring to look at them closely.

At last, on returning to the hunting-gallery, as it was called, he saw two ladies, in whom he immediately recognized the blond fairy whom he had seen at Stollborg an hour before, and her governess. Mademoiselle Potin’s simple dress, timid and refined manner, and a something about her unmistakably French, left no doubt as to her identity. This completed the first part of the little romance that Cristiano had planned. He was at the chateau, he had found no sort of difficulty in getting admitted, he had avoided the observation and questions of the master of the house; and, lastly, he had found Margaret under the kind protection of her confidante. But this was not all. He had still to approach the young countess, or attract her attention, and find some means of renewing their acquaintance on a new footing.

The second part of the romance opened in rather an alarming way. Just as Cristiano, who hoped that a look of Margaret’s would inspire him, was trying to catch her eye, he heard an unequal step clamping along behind him, and a shrill, squeaking voice stopped him short with these words:

“Monsieur! Stranger! stranger! Where are you going so fast?”

The adventurer turned, and found himself face to face with the deformed, cross-eyed old man, whom he thought he had so successfully avoided. It was literally face to face, for the lame man, who was rushing in pursuit of him, could not change his gait quickly enough, and almost fell into his arms. Cristiano might have fled, but that would have been to lose everything; he faced it out boldly, and replied:

“I beg a thousand pardons, baron; you are the very person I was looking for.”

“Ah, indeed!” said the lame man, holding out his hand with sudden cordiality; “I thought as much. I remarked your face among all the others. ‘That is an educated man,’ I said to myself; ‘some learned traveller, a serious person, a mind, in a word, and certainly I am the pole which always attracts such magnets,’ Well, here I am, at your service. It gives me pleasure to devote myself to you. I love young people when they are studious, and you can ask me all the questions that you want to have solved.”

There was so much simplicity and good-humor in the old man’s laughing face and vain talk, that Cristiano in his heart accused Margaret of doing him injustice. He was an absurd and impossible lover, to be sure, but he was the best old fellow in the world, and as harmless as a child. Although one of his eyes did wander about the room in a vague and aimless sort of a way, the other one looked at his companion with such a frank and fatherly expression, that it was utterly out of the question to accuse him of ferocity.

“I am overwhelmed by your goodness, baron,” replied Cristiano, sufficiently reassured to be somewhat ironical. “I knew that you were versed in the sciences, and therefore having myself some feeble notion—”

“You wanted to ask my advice, to have the benefit of my instruction, perhaps. Ah! my dear friend, method, method in all things. But I won’t keep you standing among these frivolous people, who are coming and going; sit down, sit down. No one will disturb us; and, if you feel inclined, we will talk all night. When science is the theme, I forget all about fatigue, hunger, and sleep. You are the same, no doubt. The fact is you must be so, or not meddle with becoming learned!”

“Alas!” thought Cristiano, “I have fallen into the bottom of a well of science, and am condemned to the mines, I wager, neither more nor less than an exile of Siberia.”

This discovery was the more cruel, because Margaret had passed on, and was already at the end of the gallery, chatting with one and another of the persons who came forward to greet her, and evidently going to the ball-room, where the baron did not seem at all inclined to join her. He was seated in one of the semicircular embrasures of the gallery, near a stove, concealed by some branches of yew and ivy, which, with various hunting weapons and stuffed heads of wild animals, formed a trophy.

“I see,” said Cristiano, who would have given a great deal to avoid the proposed scientific conversation, “that you are a universal genius. Your skill in hunting is everywhere talked of, and I am surprised that you have time—”

“Why do you take me for a hunter?” replied the old man, with a look of surprise. “Oh! you suppose that I am guilty of the murder of those beasts, whose mutilated heads are hanging there, looking at us so sadly with their poor enamel eyes! You are mistaken; I never hunted in my life. I have a horror of amusements which increase the ferocity only too natural to man. It is to the study of the insensible but fruitful entrails of the globe that I have devoted myself.”

“Excuse me, baron, I thought—”

“There, again, why do you call me baron? I am nothing of the kind; although it is true that the king ennobled me and conferred on me the knighthood of the polar star, as a reward for my labors in the mines of Falun. I was professor of the school of mineralogy in that city, as of course you know, but I have no right to a title. It is quite enough for me to have some few privileges which give me a position with the haughty caste, for which, after all, I don’t care the least in the world.”

“I have made some mistake,” thought Cristiano. “Oh, then! I shall have to escape from this scientific gentleman as quickly as possible, although I seek him out again later.”

But he changed his mind suddenly when he saw Margaret turning back, and proceeding slowly, in spite of numerous interruptions, towards the very spot where he was seated. His only thought now was to put himself on the best terms with the geologist, so that he might introduce him, if he could possibly bring it about, as a distinguished man. He dashed into conversation, therefore; and he knew more than enough to ask intelligent questions. At Falun, in the morning, he had visited the principal mine, and had taken pleasure in collecting a number of interesting specimens, to the great disgust of Puffo, who often thought him crazy. He knew, moreover, that if you listen respectfully to a learned and vain man, and give him an opportunity to display his knowledge, he will be pretty sure, as a usual thing, to think you very intelligent. This is exactly what happened. Without dreaming of asking his name, his country, or his profession, the professor gave Cristiano a minute description of the subterranean world. In fact, upon the surface of the globe, he cared for nothing but himself, his reputation, and his writings; in a word, for the success of his observations and discoveries.

At any other time Cristiano would have listened with pleasure, for he saw plainly that he was talking to a man who was thoroughly master of his subject, and, for his own part, he felt a deep interest in all departments of natural science; but Margaret was approaching, and his thoughts began to wander. The professor noticed his sudden preoccupation, and looking around with his good eye, cried:

“Ah! there is my fiancée! I am no longer surprised! Parbleu! my dear friend, I must introduce you to the most amiable person in the kingdom.”

“It is really he, then!” thought Cristiano, in profound amazement. “I am talking to Baron Olaus! He seems to be half crazy, but this is actually the old man to whom this Rose of the North is to be sacrificed!”

He ceased to doubt, although his surprise was redoubled when he saw Margaret quicken her step, and heard her say to Mademoiselle Potin:

“Here is my lover at last!”

She held out her hand to the old man, and added, with a sweet and almost tender smile:

“What are you thinking of, monsieur, to hide yourself in this little corner, when your fiancée has been looking for you for the last hour?”

“You see,” said the professor to Cristiano, with artless satisfaction, “she looks for me, she is unhappy when I am not with her! What would you have, my beauty? It is not my fault that so many people wish to consult me, and here is a charming young man, a traveller—French, are you not? or Italian, for you have a very slight foreign accent? Allow me, Countess Margaret, to introduce my young friend, M. de ——. Excuse me, monsieur, what is your name?”

“Christian Goefle,” said Cristiano, without hesitation.

At this assumed name, and, above all, at the young man’s voice and pronunciation, Margaret trembled.

“Are you Monsieur Goefle’s son?” she said, eagerly. “Oh, it is singular how much you resemble him!”

“There would be nothing singular in such near relatives looking alike,” replied the professor, “but this gentleman can only be Goefle’s nephew. Goefle never married, and consequently he has no children, any more than myself.”

“That would be no reason,” Cristiano whispered in the professor’s ear.

“To be sure; you are right!” replied the latter in the same tone, and with the most incredible simplicity; “I did not think of that! That devil of a Goefle! You are his son, then, by a left-handed marriage?”

“Brought up in a foreign country, and just arrived in Sweden,” replied Cristiano, astonished at the success of his impromptu suggestions.

“Well, well!” replied the professor, who cared very little about other people’s affairs. “I understand; it is quite plain—you are his nephew.”

He turned to Margaret.

“I know this gentleman perfectly well,” he said; “he is the nephew of my excellent friend Monsieur Goefle, and I have the honor to present him to you. You don’t know M. Goefle, but you said this morning that you would like to become acquainted with him.”

“And so I should,” cried Margaret.

She blushed as she spoke, for at that very moment she met Cristiano’s eyes, and their vivacity reminded her of those of the false Goefle. From time to time the young man, with an involuntary movement, had raised the doctor’s green spectacles, so as to see better, and Margaret had noticed how brilliantly his eyes flashed between the ear-pieces of his fur cap.

“But how is it,” resumed the professor, addressing the young girl without observing her confusion, “that you are not dancing? I thought you would be the queen of the evening, and that no one would have a chance to speak to you.”

“Well, my dear lover, you are mistaken. I am not going to dance. I sprained my foot coming down stairs. Don’t you see how lame I am?”

“No, I can’t say that I do. You want to resemble me, do you? Tell M. Goefle how it was that I became lame; it was a terrible affair, and would have been the death of any one else. Yes, monsieur, you see before you a victim of science.”

Without giving Margaret time to speak, he began to relate, with great animation, how the rope had broken as he had been descending into a mine, and how he had fallen with the basket into the bottom of the abyss, a distance of fifty feet, seven inches, and five lines. For six hours, fifty-three minutes, and how many seconds we are not prepared to state, he lay in a swoon, and for two months, four days, and three hours and a half, had not been able to move. With the same exasperating accuracy he specified the exact size of the plasters that had been applied to his various wounds, and the quantity, by drachms, grains, and scruples, of the different drugs that he had absorbed, whether in doses taken internally, or by means of external applications rubbed into his skin.

It was a long story, although the old man spoke rapidly, and did not repeat himself. His memory was a real scourge; it would not allow him to omit the least circumstance; and when he was talking of himself, it never occurred to him that any one could be tired of listening.

Margaret, who knew the story by heart, could not be very attentive, and talked aside with Mademoiselle Potin for a few moments. The result of this short conference, which Cristiano did not fail to notice, was soon evident; good Mademoiselle Potin seized the moment when the professor had finished his story, and before he could embark in another, which he was all ready to do, begged him, with hypocritical frankness, to explain a paragraph in his last work, which she pretended she had not been able to understand.

Cristiano could not help admiring woman’s natural tact, when he saw how eagerly the professor entered into a discussion with the governess, while Margaret’s eyes said clearly to the young man:

“I am dying to speak to you.”

He did not wait to be told twice, but followed her to the other extremity of the little semicircle, where she seated herself upon a sofa, while he stood before her in a respectful attitude, outside the embrasure, in such a way as to shield her from observation.

“Monsieur Christian Goefle,” she said, looking at him again with the greatest attention, “you are surprisingly like your uncle!”

“I have often been told so, mademoiselle; it seems that it is a striking likeness.”

“I have never seen him well; indeed, I may say that I have never seen his face at all; but his accent, his pronunciation—yours are absolutely the same.”

“I should have supposed that my voice would be rather younger than his,” replied Cristiano, who had taken pains at Stollborg to speak, every now and then, like an old man.

“Yes, no doubt,” said the young girl; “there is the difference of age, although your uncle still has a very fine organ. After all, he cannot be so very old! He seemed to me much younger than people say. He has magnificent eyes, and is almost of your height.”

“Just about the same,” said Cristiano, giving an involuntary glance at the doctor of law’s suit of clothes, and asking himself whether Margaret was speaking ironically, or questioning him in good faith.

He resolved to bring about an explanation.

“There is another point of resemblance between my uncle and myself,” he said, “and that is the deep interest that we feel in a person of your acquaintance, and the desire with which we both are animated to be of service to her.”

“Ah! ah!” said the young girl, blushing with an air of frankness that dissipated Cristiano’s anxiety; “I see that your uncle has been gossiping, and that he has told you about my visit this evening.”

“I don’t know whether you confided any secret to him; in what he repeated to me there was no mystery at which you need blush.”

“Repeated?—repeated? I believe you were there, in some room or closet close by; you heard everything.”

“It was so, I confess,” replied Cristiano, who saw that she would confide in him more quickly if he took advantage of her innocent suggestion. “I was in my uncle’s bed-room, arranging his papers. Without his knowledge, and in spite of myself, I heard everything.”

“That is very pleasant, upon my word!” said Margaret, somewhat confused, and yet pleased without knowing why; “instead of one confidante it seems that I had two.”

“Your confession seemed to be that of an angel; but I am beginning to be afraid that it was in reality that of a demon.”

“Thanks for your good opinion. Will you tell me what has caused it?”

“A strange insincerity that I cannot explain. You described Baron Olaus as a monster, physically and morally—”

“Excuse me, monsieur; you did not understand me. I called him disagreeable, terrible; I never said that he was ugly.”

“And yet you might have said so truthfully; for to speak plainly, he is abominably ugly.”

“It is true that his hard and cold expression makes him seem so; but every one agrees that he has very fine features.”

“The people of this country have a singular standard; but there is no disputing about tastes! I do not agree with them. He seems to me ugly and deformed, but comical and good-humored.”

“You are certainly joking, M. Christian Goefle, or we do not understand each other. God forgive me, you are looking at the person opposite. Is it possible that you have mistaken him for the Baron de Waldemora?”

“How can I help supposing that the person who calls you his fiancée, and whom you gayly call your lover, is the baron?”

Margaret burst out laughing.

“Oh! dear me,” she cried, “if you have really imagined that I could treat Baron Olaus with such friendly familiarity, you must have thought me very deceitful or very inconsistent; but, thank God, I am neither the one nor the other. The individual whom I call jestingly my lover, is a person of no less consequence than the doctor of sciences, Monsieur Stangstadius, of whom you must have heard your uncle speak.”

“Doctor Stangstadius,” replied Cristiano, feeling very much relieved; “I must confess that I do not know him, even by name. I have just arrived from a distant country, where I have always lived.”

“I can understand, then,” replied Margaret, “how it is that you have not heard of our learned mineralogist. Your opinion of him is very correct. He is an excellent man, sometimes a little violent, but never malicious. And then he is simple as a child! There are certain days when he imagines that my passion for him, as he calls it, is serious, and when he tries to break the chain, assuring me that a great man like himself belongs to the universe, and cannot devote himself to a woman. I have known him for a long time; ever since he came to the chateau where I was brought up, for the purpose of making investigations on our estates. He passed several weeks with us, and, since then, my aunt has allowed him to visit me whenever his business brings him to our province. He was my only acquaintance here when I arrived, for you must know that Baron Olaus has made him superintendent of important mining operations on his domain. But there is my aunt looking for me! Now I shall have a good scolding, you will see!”

“Do you want to avoid her? Pass between the wall and this hunting trophy.”

“Potin would have to go too, and we could never persuade M. Stangstadius to keep our secret. Oh dear! now my aunt will torment me to death to dance with the baron, but I shall persist in being lame, though the pain is so slight that I scarcely feel it.”

“It is nothing at all, I hope.”

“Yes, indeed. I was so fortunate as to fall down on the staircase a little while ago, in my aunt’s presence. My ankle really did hurt me a little, and I looked dreadfully woe-begone, to prove that I could not possibly open the court dance with the master of the house. My aunt had to take my place, and that is why I am here; but the dance is over, and here she comes!”

In fact, Countess Elfride d’Elveda approached, and Cristiano, who had taken a seat by Margaret’s side, drew back a little.

The countess was a small woman, fair, fat, lively and resolute. She was scarcely thirty-five years old, and was very coquettish, although less from gallantry than a love of intrigue.

She was one of the most ardent caps in Sweden; that is, she took sides with Russia against France, whose partisans were called hats; and with the nobility and Lutheran clergy against the king, who naturally sought his support in the other orders of the state, the citizens and peasants.

She had been pretty, and, what with her wit and rank, was still sufficiently so to make conquests; but there was something in her manner, by turns haughty and familiar, that displeased Cristiano. Her evident duplicity and obstinacy, which he read at a glance, did not seem to him to promise well for Margaret’s future.

“Well,” she said to the latter, sharply and briefly, “what are you doing here crouched up against this stove, as if you were frozen? Come, I want to speak to you!”

“Yes, aunt,” replied Margaret, pretending, with innocent hypocrisy, to rise with difficulty; “but the fact is that I am suffering very much with my foot. Being unable to dance, I felt cold in the large saloon.”

“Whom were you talking to?” inquired the countess, looking at Cristiano, who had gone up to M. Stangstadius.

“The nephew of your friend M. Goefle, whom Monsieur Stangstadius just presented to me. Shall I introduce him to you, aunt?”

Cristiano, who was not listening to the professor, heard perfectly well what Margaret said. Resolved to risk everything to continue his acquaintance with the niece, he came forward of his own accord, and bowed to the aunt in such a respectful and graceful manner, that she was struck by his fine appearance. She must have been very much in need of M. Goefle, for, in spite of Cristiano’s plebeian name, she received him as courteously as if he had belonged to one of the best families in the country; and when Monsieur Stangstadius declared that he was a young man of great merit, became excessively condescending.

“I am delighted to make your acquaintance,” she said, “and I am angry with M. Goefle for never speaking to me about a nephew who does him honor. Are you a devotee of science, like our distinguished friend Stangstadius? I am glad to hear it. There is no finer career that a young man can choose. No position is more agreeable than that of the scientific man, for he is not obliged to make sacrifices to obtain consideration.”

“I see that it is so in Sweden,” replied Cristiano, “and it is an honor to this noble country. In Italy, where I was brought up, and even in France, which was my home for some time, it is very different; there, learned men are generally poor, and poorly encouraged, when they are not persecuted by religious fanaticism.”

This reply enraptured the geologist, who was very vain of his country, and was extremely pleasing to the countess, who despised France.

“You are right,” she said, “and I do not understand why your uncle should not have had you educated in your own country, where the position of students is so fortunate and honorable.”

“He wished me to speak the foreign languages with facility,” replied Cristiano, saying the first thing that occurred to him, “but he need not have sent me so far upon that account; for you speak French here, I find, as well as they do in France.”

“We are much obliged to you for your politeness,” said the countess, “but you are flattering us. We do not speak it as well as you do, probably, and our Italian is still worse—although every one who is carefully educated studies it. You must talk Italian with my niece, and, if she makes mistakes, laugh at her well. But why is M. Goefle so anxious about the modern languages? Does he intend you for a diplomat?”

“Perhaps, madame; I am not yet fully aware of his intentions.”

“Fie! Fie! Pooh!” cried the geologist.

“Softly, dear professor,” resumed the countess; “there is a great deal to be said on that side too. All careers are desirable for those who know how to make them so.”

“If you, madame, will condescend to advise me, I shall esteem it a privilege to be indebted to you for a valuable suggestion.”

“It will give me pleasure to do so,” she replied, with an affectation of genial amiability; “and I feel all the more interest in you, because you have all the qualities to insure success. Come with us to the dancing-hall. I want my niece to dance at least one minuet; it is not fatiguing, and she is very perverse to refuse. Do you hear, Margaret? You must do like every one else!”

“But, aunt,” said Margaret, “every one has not a sprained ankle.”

“In society, my child (I am saying this, Monsieur Goefle, for your benefit as well), you must never let anything prevent you from being agreeable or useful. Remember one thing: no one fails to fulfil his destiny but through his own fault. You must have a will of iron; you must be superior to cold and heat, hunger and thirst, great sufferings as well as little pains. The world is not, as young people imagine, a fairy palace, where you live for enjoyment. It is, on the contrary, a place of trial, where you will have to conquer all your wants, all your desires, all your repugnances, with real stoicism;—that is, if you have an aim in life, and if you have not you are a very weak person. Ask your lover, Margaret, whether he thinks of his little comforts when he descends into an abyss to seek that which is the aim of his life. Very well; under the domes of palaces, as well as in the caverns of mines, there are horrors to be braved. That of dancing with a slight pain in your ankle is a very little thing in comparison with what is before you. Come along; get up and come!”

Margaret could not help looking piteously at Cristiano, as much as to say:

“You see, I shall never be as strong as she is.”

“Shall I offer my arm to Countess Margaret?” said Cristiano to the imperious aunt; “she is really limping.”

“No, no; it is nothing but caprice! You will see that she will stop limping soon enough, for it is very awkward. Come, Margaret, give your arm to M. Stangstadius, and go before us; we want to see which of you limps the most.”

“What’s that? What’s that?” cried the professor; “I don’t limp at all, when I’m careful. If I choose I can walk ten times straighter and faster than the best pedestrians. I only wish you could see me up in the mountains, proving to the lazy guides that one can do whatever he wishes!”

As he spoke, M. Stangstadius began to walk very rapidly, but with such a vigorous elevation of his misshapen person at every alternate step, that poor Margaret was almost lifted bodily off the floor.

“Give me your arm,” said Countess Elfride to Cristiano; “not that I care for an escort, or require any assistance, but because I wish to speak to you.”

Cristiano obeyed, and the countess, who both walked and talked rapidly, added:

“Your uncle has told you, I suppose, that I wish to marry my niece to the Baron de Waldemora?”

“Yes, madame, he told me so—this evening.”

“This evening? Has he arrived? I did not know that he was here!”

“He could not find a room at the chateau, no doubt, and he is stopping at Stollborg.”

“What! In that den of evil spirits? Well! he will be in good company! But isn’t he coming to the ball?”

“I hope not!” replied Cristiano, thoughtlessly.

“You hope not!”

“I say so because of his gout, which requires perfect repose.”

“Indeed! Has he the gout? What a trial to such a brisk, active man! He never had it before, and imagined that he was always going to escape.”

“It is quite recent—the attack came on only a few days ago. He sent me here in his place to present his compliments to you, and receive your commands, which I will communicate to him as soon as he wakes in the morning.”

“Very well, then, you can tell him what I say. This is a matter that I make no sort of mystery about. I have noticed that, when you proclaim your plans boldly, they are already half accomplished. It is my wish, therefore, to marry my niece to the baron. You will tell me, perhaps, that he is not young; for that very reason he has no time to lose in frustrating the schemes of a dozen heirs whom he detests, and who are trying in vain to worm their way into his favor. Stay, there are two of them passing now; the one this way is the Count de Nora, an inoffensive, good-natured man; the other, the Baron de Lindenwald, is intelligent, designing, ambitious, and (like all of our nobility at present) poor. Baron Olaus is a happy exception, because he has no brothers. Now, what I want you to understand—you and your uncle as well—is, that the baron looks with a favorable eye upon my niece, and that she dislikes him. This does not discourage me at all. My niece is a child, and will submit. Since my resolution is known, no one will venture to pay court to him, and I will take care of her. Your uncle must undertake to bring the baron to a determination, and he can do it easily.”

“If the countess will condescend to give me her instructions—”

“You shall have them in two words: my niece loves the baron!”

“Really?”

“What! You do not understand? An aspirant in diplomacy!”

“Ah! of course;—excuse me, madame—Countess Margaret is reputed to love the baron, although she detests him, and—”

“The baron must believe that he is loved?”

“And it is Monsieur Goefle who must make him think so?”

“He alone. The baron is very suspicious; I have known him of old; I could not persuade him. He would suppose that I was interested.”

“Which is not the case,” said Cristiano, smiling.

“Which is the case!—for my niece. Ought I not to be so?”

“Assuredly; but will M. Goefle lend himself to this slight exaggeration?”

“A lawyer hesitate to embellish the truth a little? Nonsense! When your dear uncle has a suit to gain he is not so scrupulous!”

“No doubt; but will the baron believe him?”

“He will believe whatever M. Goefle tells him. According to him, he is the only sincere man alive.”

“The baron, then, wishes to be loved for himself?”

“Yes, he has that fancy.”

“If he loves Countess Margaret he will find it easy to deceive himself.”

“Loves her? Do you suppose any one falls in love when they have reached his age? That has nothing to do with it. The baron is a man of serious character, who wishes to marry for the sake of leaving an heir, having lost his son five years ago. If his wife is pretty, and of good family, he will be satisfied, and his only request of her will be not to make him ridiculous. Now he runs no risks with my niece; she is a girl of good principles, and, whether contented or not, she will never forget her dignity. You can tell your uncle so, to set his doubts at rest. Tell him, also, that he can rely upon my gratitude, which, as he knows, is not to be despised. In my position I can reward slight services with important ones; and, to begin with, what would he like for you? What would you like for yourself? Do you want to be attaché at once, and on a good footing with the Russian embassy? I have only to say the word. The ambassador is here.”

“God forbid!” said Cristiano, who detested Russia.

He recovered himself quickly, and not wishing to have a misunderstanding with the countess too soon, finished his sentence thus:

“God forbid that I should ever forget your goodness! I will do all in my power to deserve it.”

“Very well, begin at once.”

“Shall I go over to Stollborg and wake up my uncle?”

“No; keep near my niece, and talk to her from time to time in the course of the evening. Take advantage of the opportunity to eulogize the baron.”

“But I do not know him.”

“You have seen him, that is enough. You can speak as if you had been struck by his fine manner and noble figure.”

“I should be quite at your service if I had seen him; but—”

“Ah! you have not yet paid your respects to him. Come, then, and I will introduce you. But no, there is another way. Go and ask Margaret to point him out to you, and exclaim immediately about the beauty of his features and person. That will be simple, spontaneous, and worth a great deal more than a studied eulogy.”

“But why should my opinion, even supposing it to be sincere, have the slightest influence with your niece?”

“In Sweden, any one who has travelled has more influence than two or three ordinary mortals. And then, don’t you know that young girls don’t understand their own natures; that it is vanity that impels them to choose their lovers, and not sympathy; and that the man, consequently, whom they admire the most, is always the one who is most admired by others? Stay! there is my niece seated with some other young ladies, who certainly would be very glad of a chance to win the baron. That will do nicely. I will leave her there, and you can join the circle. To give you an opportunity to fulfil your promise, I will take the baron’s arm and walk up and down in full view of this solemn assembly. Seize the right moment.”

“But what will the baron think if he happens to notice me? He will set me down as an awkward boor, too ignorant either to ask any one to introduce me to him, or to introduce myself.”

“Don’t trouble yourself; I will make it all right. Besides, the baron will not see you; he is very short-sighted, and only recognizes people by their voices. When he hunts he wears glasses, and sees perfectly well; but he is still too much of an exquisite to use them in society. It is all settled. Away with you!”

In another moment Cristiano was passing among the groups of beautiful young ladies who were reposing between the dances. He introduced himself to one of these little coteries by saying something polite to Mademoiselle Potin, who was next the wall, and who, poor girl, was very much gratified at his courtesy. Margaret was delighted to see him among the young men who surrounded her companions, and the latter soon learned from her that he was “a young man of great promise, nephew of the celebrated Goefle, the intimate friend of her aunt.” Some of them turned up their noses, and thought it not at all the thing that a plebeian should venture to come and entertain them, among the young officers of the indelta,[3] who generally belonged to good families; but most of them welcomed him kindly, and thought him charming.

The fact is, that Cristiano, like a great many adventurers in this adventurous age, was charming. His style of beauty, also—a singular coincidence that he had not thought of explaining—was precisely that best calculated to please in this country. He was tall and well formed, fair, with a clear red and white complexion, with dark blue eyes and strongly marked eyebrows, as black as ebony, as were his long curved lashes and magnificent hair. Moreover, there was a something peculiar about him that attracted attention: a sort of foreign style, a suavity in his language and manners telling of the more civilized, or, at least, the more artistic circles to which he had belonged; a lingering perfume, as it were, of Italy and France. As soon as it was known that he had been brought up in Italy, he was overwhelmed with questions, to which he replied with so much good sense, frankness, and gayety, that after chatting for a little while, all these young mad-caps were crazy about him. Cristiano, although by no means a fop, was not at all surprised. He had been used to pleasing in other days, and when he resolved to indulge once more, at all costs, in an evening’s gayety, he knew, that unless his success should be seriously interfered with by some unexpected revelation, he would appear to better advantage than most of the young nobles and officers who were present.

In the meanwhile, the little Countess Elfride, who was leaning, or rather hanging upon the arm of the imposing Baron Olaus, had passed twice without catching Cristiano’s eye. The third time she coughed violently, and led the baron up to Margaret, while Cristiano, who understood, broke away from the bewildering group and fell back, to observe his host without attracting his attention.

Baron Olaus was a tall, stout man, and, in spite of his age, was still very handsome, but the deadly pallor and sinister impassibility of his countenance made it really appalling. His fixed look struck you like a blast of icy wind that takes the breath away, and the expression of his face when he smiled was extraordinarily sad and disdainful. As soon as he spoke to Margaret, Cristiano recognized him from his voice, which was disagreeably harsh and monotonous, as the very person who had been selling Sweden so cheap an hour before in his conferences with the Russian diplomatist. He recognized him also from his lofty stature and rich dark dress, which he had noticed while listening to him doing the honors of his country to the enemy.

“Have you fully determined not to dance, mademoiselle?” said the disagreeable baron to Margaret. “Are you suffering much?”

The countess did not give Margaret time to answer.

“Oh, it is nothing!” she said; “Margaret will dance soon.”

She led the baron away, after looking again in a domineering manner at Cristiano. Now this is how he obeyed her:

“So that is Baron Olaus de Waldemora?” he said, approaching Margaret and Mademoiselle Potin, who had hastened to join the young girl at the approach of her chaperone.

“That is he!” replied Margaret, with a bitter smile. “What do you think of him?”

“He must have been quite handsome thirty years ago.”

“That, at least,” rejoined Margaret, with a sigh. “Did you like his face?”

“Yes; I have a great admiration for cheerful faces. There is a certain gayety about his—”

“Is it not frightful?”

“What was that you said to my uncle?” said Cristiano, sitting down beside her chair, and lowering his voice; “did he kill his sister-in-law?”

“It is thought so.”

“For my part, I am sure of it.”

“Indeed! Why?”

“Because he must have looked at her!”

“Oh! Is it not true that he has the evil eye?”

“You exaggerate a little,” said Mademoiselle Potin, who no doubt had been terrified by some silent threat of Countess Elfride. “He has the fixed look of people who do not see well.”

“Just so,” said Cristiano; “death is blind. But who gave the baron the surname of the Snow Man? It suits him: he is the living embodiment of a Spitzbergen winter. He has given me a chill.”

“And did you notice his curious habit?” said Margaret.

“He put his hand to his forehead as if to wipe off the perspiration; do you mean that?”

“Exactly.”

“The Snow Man wants, perhaps, to make us believe that he is perspiring; but the simple truth is that he is thawing.”

“You see that I had good cause to be afraid of him. And his black diamond—did you notice that?”

“Yes, I noticed the hideous black diamond, as he wiped his forehead with his fleshless hand; which forms such a singular contrast to his corpulent figure and bloated face.”

“Whom are you talking about so?” said a young Russian lady, who had risen to spread out her gown over her hoop petticoat; “the Baron de Waldemora?”

“I was just about to say,” said Cristiano, without being disconcerted, “that that worthy man has not three months to live.”

“Oh, then,” cried the Russian, laughing, “you must make haste to marry him, Margaret!”

“Keep your advice for yourself, Olga,” replied the young countess.

“Alas! I have not, like you, an aunt who carries everything before her! But what makes you think, M. Goefle, that the baron is so ill?”

“From the unhealthy disproportion of his figure, from the yellow white of his glassy eyes, from the pinched-in look at the base of his hooked nose, and, above all, from an indefinable feeling that came over me as soon as I saw him.”

“Indeed! Are you gifted with the second sight, like the people in the north of this country?”

“I don’t know anything about that. I don’t consider myself a sorcerer; but I am quite satisfied that some organizations are more or less sensitive to certain mysterious influences, and I answer for it that the baron has not long to live.”

“I think,” said Margaret, “that he has been dead already for a long time; and that it is only by means of some diabolical secret that he succeeds in passing himself off for a living man.”

“It is true that he looks like a spectre,” said Olga; “but no matter, he is handsome in spite of his age, and he has a strange power of fascination. I dreamed about him all last night. I was frightened, and yet it was a pleasant fear. Can you explain that?”

“It is perfectly simple,” replied Margaret, “the baron is a famous alchemist; he knows how to make diamonds. Now you told us this morning that you would sign a compact with the devil for diamonds.”

“You are wicked, Margaret! Suppose I should tell others how you talk about the baron, and it should come to his ears; you would be vexed enough, I wager.”

“Do you think so, Monsieur Goefle?” said Margaret to Cristiano.

“No,” he replied. “Why should angels care for diamonds? have they not the stars?”

Margaret blushed, and turned to the young Russian:

“My dear Olga,” she said, “I implore you tell the baron yourself that I cannot endure him. You will be doing me a great service. Stay! I will prove my gratitude. There is the bracelet that you wanted so much! Make a quarrel between me and the baron, and I will agree to give it to you.”

“Oh, dear me! but what will your aunt say?”

“I will tell her that I have lost it, and you must not wear it while you are here—no questions will be asked. See, the baron is returning! They are going to dance another minuet, and he is coming to invite me; but I shall refuse. My aunt is talking politics with the Russian ambassador, and will not see me. Stay by me, and he will have to ask you.”

In fact, the baron came forward, and renewed his invitation with a sepulchral grace. Margaret trembled in every limb when he held out his hand to take hers.

“Countess Elveda informs me,” he said, “that you would like to dance now, and I am going to have another minuet for you.”

Margaret arose, took a step forward, and fell back in her chair.

“I should be glad to obey my aunt,” she said firmly, “but you see, baron, that I cannot, and I do not suppose that you want to torture me.”

The baron started. He was a man of intelligence, perfectly well-bred, and excessively suspicious. The countess had not deceived him so effectually that he was not capable of understanding the slightest hint, and Margaret’s aversion was too evident to be mistaken. He smiled bitterly, and replied with sarcastic courtesy:

“You are a thousand times too good, mademoiselle, and I trust you will believe that I feel your kindness deeply.”

He turned immediately to Olga, invited her, and led her away; while Margaret snatched the elegant bracelet from her arm, and slipped it into the ambitious young creature’s hand.

“Monsieur Goefle,” she said to Cristiano, eagerly, although with a trembling voice, “you have brought me happiness. I am saved!”

“And yet you are pale,” said Cristiano; “you are trembling.”

“I cannot help it! I was so frightened. And I am frightened still, for I cannot help thinking how angry my aunt will be. But no matter, I have got rid of the baron. He will revenge himself; he will kill me, perhaps. But I shall not be his wife; I shall not bear his name. I shall never touch his blood-stained hand.”

“Be quiet, for heaven’s sake be quiet!” said Mademoiselle Potin, who was as pale and frightened as herself; “some one may hear you. You have been very brave, and I congratulate you. But you are really timid, and all this excitement will make you ill. Mon Dieu! don’t faint, my dear child. Take your smelling-bottle.”

“Don’t be afraid, my good friend,” replied Margaret, “I have recovered. Did any one around see what happened? I am afraid to look.”

“No, God be praised! The noise of the orchestra, which had just begun playing, drowned every other sound, and your young friends were hurrying away to the dance. We are almost alone in this corner. Don’t stay here and attract attention. Above all things, avoid having a scene with your aunt while you are so excited. Come with me to your room; give me your arm.”

“And shall I not see you again?” said Cristiano, with an emotion that he could not control.

“Yes, surely,” replied Margaret, “I want to speak to you again. In an hour you will find us—”

“Where shall I find you?”

“I don’t know. Oh yes! in the supper-room.”

As Margaret withdrew, Cristiano left the hall by another door, and began to look for the place of rendezvous, so that he might be there promptly at the appointed hour. Besides, he had been suffering from hunger ever since he came to the ball, in spite of his interesting adventures, and the word supper-room aroused his appetite to full activity.

“If no one is there,” he said to himself, “I shall make terrible inroad into the provisions of my lord baron.”

While he is proceeding towards this sanctuary, let us see what was taking place in the drawing-room.

[3] A standing army, with an organization peculiar to Sweden, settled for life in each province.

[IV.]

THE baron was certainly not fond of dancing, and his corpulence was by no means calculated to help him cut pigeon-wings; but in the “court-dances” which were usual at that period it was customary, and considered the proper thing to do, for even the gravest persons to take a part. The baron, who had been a widower for a long time, had given scarcely any entertainments during the life of his lawful heir; but when it became apparent that his name was in danger of perishing with him, and that his titles and estates would pass to a branch of his family which he hated, he had promptly resolved to marry again as early as possible; and, in choosing a wife, he had made up his mind to select, not a suitable and agreeable companion, for he felt no need of such a person, but some healthy young girl from whom he might expect children. He had accordingly furnished his mansion in a luxurious style, and had assembled together the ladies of the province, with the sole design of placing his baronial coronet upon the head of the prettiest among them who should be so kind as to offer to wear it.

The Countess Elfride had thought herself sure of the prize, but her plans had failed. The elderly suitor opened his eyes to the fact that he had been made to look ridiculous, and swore to be revenged both upon aunt and niece. Moreover, to this oath, which he registered in his mind with much promptitude, he appended a firm resolve not to be deceived twice; but, without admitting the interference of any third party, to offer himself to the first young lady of good family who should receive him with a sufficient degree of cordiality. This person turned out to be Olga, as he felt convinced when that young lady proceeded to tell him, in a confidential whisper, how Margaret had made over to her all right, title, and interest in his affections. She confided this pretty story to him with an assumed air of innocence and candor, as if it were the prattle of a child; and, really, she was a child in many respects, though none the less a woman, at once possessed and made cunning by ambition. The baron, who was by no means wanting in penetration, kept up the joke as if he saw nothing more in it; but, at the end of the dance, instead of taking Olga to her seat, he offered her his arm, and led her into the gallery, whose great extent rendered it quite suitable for confidential interviews. There, taking her burning hands between his icy cold ones, he said coldly:

“Olga, you are young and beautiful, but you are poor, and of too high rank to marry a handsome young fellow of low birth. It rests with you to turn your jest into earnest. I offer you my title and a brilliant position. Answer me seriously and without delay, or otherwise dismiss this subject forever from your mind.”

Olga was really young, beautiful, poor, vain, and ambitious. She took time by the forelock, and accepted at once.

“Very good,” observed Olaus, kissing her hand, “I thank you. Excuse me if I say not a word further. I should make myself ridiculous if I should undertake to talk to you about love, for you would imagine that I think myself a person who can be loved. We will be married—that is settled; and we both of us have decisive reasons for this resolution—that is certain. In the meanwhile, in case you really desire this marriage, I must request you to keep it an absolute secret for some days, above all from the Countess Margaret and her aunt. Can you promise me this? Remember, any indiscretion would break off our engagement.”

Olga had too much at stake not to give the required promise in good faith; and the baron handed her back to the great drawing-room.

Their absence had been so brief, that, even if observed, no particular conclusion could have been drawn from it. Yet the Countess d’Elveda felt uneasy at it, and went to find out what had become of her niece.

“Do not annoy yourself,” remarked Olga, “she was here this very moment.”

“She is hiding herself—she is still obstinate about dancing.”

“By no means,” said the baron, “she had consented to dance. It was I who declined to take advantage of her kindness.”

And offering his arm to the countess, he walked away with her, explaining, as they went, that he did not wish any one to be constrained to love him; that he was old enough to pay his addresses for himself, and that he begged her not to interpose further in the matter, lest she should be the means of his losing all hope, and even of his giving up his design of marrying.

The countess consoled herself for this reprimand, by the recollection that it was the first time the baron had shown any decided purpose of seeking her niece’s hand. Intriguing and perfidious as she was, she was this time the dupe of the baron, whose only object was to deceive her as she had deceived him.

“It is astonishing,” said Cristiano to himself, as he set out to find the supper-room, “to watch these intriguers in high life, to see how foolish they are in their malignity, and how easily they are deceived! But that must necessarily be the case in matters of that kind, when one lays down the principle, to begin with, of absolute contempt for the human species. We cannot despise others without despising ourselves. He who does not think well of the work he is doing is made impotent by that very fact. It was a superb piece of comedy for that aunt to tell me so calmly, ‘have a niece to immolate; help me about it; be quick, and I will pay you by giving you a position as head valet in a good family!’”

Cristiano, however, put aside his philosophic reflections as he entered the room he was looking after, which he discovered by a really delicious odor of venison. It was a very handsome circular room, laid with small movable tables, with a view of temporarily assuaging impatient appetites while waiting for the grand supper. As everybody had done great honor to the baron’s table already at nine o’clock, the room was empty, except for one servant, who was fast asleep, and whom Cristiano took pains not to waken, lest he should be considered greedy and ill-mannered. Without stopping to select, he seized a plate of stuffed veal à la Française; but just as he made a cut into it with the vermilion-handled knife, the servant, startled out of his sleep, sprang up as if he had been moved by springs, and M. Stangstadius bustled in, rattling the glasses and crockery with the jar which his uneven, jerking step communicated to the floor.

“Parbleu! It’s you, is it?” he called out, on seeing Cristiano. “Glad to find you here! I don’t like to eat alone, and we can talk over serious matters while we satisfy the blind appetites of these poor human machines of ours. Pooh! you don’t mean to eat standing? Oh no! It’s extremely unfavorable to the digestion, and you don’t taste what you eat at all. Here, Karl, draw out that table—the largest. Very good. Now then, give us some of the best there is. How? Side-dishes? No, not yet. Something more solid; some good slices of that sirloin. After that you can bring the best cut out of that bear’s ham. It’s a Norway ham, I hope; they are the best smoked. Come, Karl, some wine! Give us some Madeira and Bordeaux, and you may bring a few bottles of champagne, too, for this young man; he’s likely to be fond of it. Very well, Karl. That’ll do, my boy; but don’t go, we shall want some dessert very shortly.”

While giving these orders, M. Stangstadius installed himself with his back to the stove, and applied himself to eating and drinking after so marvellous a fashion, that Cristiano cast away all shame, and began devouring with the whole force of his thirty-two teeth. As for the man of science, who had not more than a dozen, he manœuvred them so ably that he was not a whit behindhand, while all the while he continued talking and gesticulating with wonderful energy. Cristiano, astonished, inwardly compared him to some fantastic monster, half crocodile and half ape; and asked himself where could be the seat of this terrible vitality in a body so misshapen, apparently so feeble, and with diverging eyes incessantly moving, but with no expression whatever.

The conversation of the geologist soon did something to help solve the problem. The worthy gentleman had never loved a human being, nor even so much as a dog. Everything was perfectly indifferent to him beyond the circle of ideas in which he lived, so to speak, on himself; taking his own pleasure, admiring himself, flattering himself, and, in default of better material, finding nourishment in the perfumes of his own self-praise.

Cristiano felicitated him upon his magnificent health.

“Do you see, my dear fellow,” he replied, “when God made me he came to a full stop. I swear to you he could not have produced such another! I know nothing of the sufferings that others feel. To begin with, I have never known the vulgar and despicable infirmity of love. I never wasted one minute in my life in forgetting myself for one of those pretty dolls that you make idols of. A woman may be eighty or eighteen—it’s exactly the same to me. When I am hungry, if I am in a hovel, I eat whatever I can find, and if I find nothing, I occupy myself in thinking over my works; and I wait, without any uneasiness. If I am at a good table, I eat everything there is on it, and without feeling any inconvenience. I feel neither cold nor heat. My head is always burning, it is true; but it is with a sublime fire that does not consume the mechanism, but, on the contrary, nourishes and repairs it. I know neither hate nor envy. I am perfectly aware that no one knows more than I; and as to those who are jealous of me—there are a vast many of them—I crush them like the worms of the dust. They never recover after a criticism from me. In short, I am made of steel, gold, and diamond; I defy the entrails of the whole earth to supply a material more impassible or more precious than that of which I am made.”

At this comprehensive and frank declaration Cristiano could not help an immoderate explosion of laughter, which, however, did not at all disconcert or offend the Chevalier of the Polar Star. On the contrary, he took this hilarity to be a joyous homage to his own universal superiority; so that Cristiano perceived that his companion was, in some sense, a monomaniac of a curious species, whose infirmity might be defined as lunacy from excess of self-conceit. Cristiano questioned him in vain about such persons as interested him. As to the Baron de Waldemora, M. Stangstadius would only condescend to say that he had some aspirations towards science, but that, on the whole, he was simply an idiot. Margaret he set down as stupid for not accepting the first rich match that came along. He did, it is true, spare her a little, admitting that she must be more amiable than the rest of them, since she was in love with him. This he thought a proof of good sense, but he found it impossible to profit by this disposition of hers, since science was his wife and mistress at the same time.

“Really, Mr. Professor,” said Cristiano, “you seem to be admirably consistent in this wonderful logical system of yours.”

“Ah! I’ll answer for that,” replied M. Stangstadius; “I’m a different sort of man from your Baron Olaus, whom fools admire for his strength of will and coolness!”

“My baron? I assure you that I want nothing to do with him.”

“For my part I speak neither well nor ill of him,” returned the professor; “all men are poor creatures, more or less; but does he not pretend to be a free-thinker, and to have never loved?”

“Could he have ever really loved any one? If he could, his face is extremely deceptive.”

“I don’t know but he may have loved his wife, while she lived. She was a malignant she-devil.”

“Perhaps, then, he admired her.”

“I’m sure I don’t know. She managed him, however, as she chose; and after she was dead, he could not endure to be without her, and so he came to engage me to calcine and crystallize her ladyship, the baroness.”

“Ah! then the famous black diamond is your work?”

“You have seen it, then! Is it not a capital result of experiment! The lapidary who cut it was in perfect despair at not being able to discover whether it was the work of nature or of art. But I must tell you the method I pursued, and how I secured its transparency. I took my body and wrapped it in asbestos cloth, after the manner of the ancients, and placed it over an extremely hot fire of wood, coal, and bitumen, the whole well sprinkled with naphtha. When my body was thoroughly reduced—”

Cristiano, finding himself condemned to undergo the history of the reduction and vitrification of the baroness, set about eating as fast as he could, and tried not to hear; but he had perfectly stuffed himself before the professor had ended his demonstration. This meeting was a sad disappointment to Cristiano, who had hoped for an interview with only Margaret and her governess. And he became more dissatisfied still, as a group of young officers of the indelta invaded the hall.

These northern stomachs were far from being satisfied with the refreshments and cooling beverages provided in the ball-room, and so they came hither to warm their blood a little with good Spanish and French wine; and Cristiano observed with interest something peculiar in the way in which these men of the north drank their wine, and which he had never been able to notice to so good advantage. He began, moreover, to see something a little rude in their manners, and a rather rougher style of gayety than he found himself quite able to join in. But to make amends, the free-heartedness and cordiality of the young men were such as he entirely sympathized with. They all greeted him with eager kindness, and insisted on his drinking with them, until he found his head beginning to feel the liquor. He therefore stopped, fearing to go too far, but admiring the ease with which these robust sons of the mountains went straight on drinking the heady wine, without apparently feeling it at all.

As soon as he could disengage himself from their friendly challenges, he took up a position near the door, in order to go out whenever he should perceive Margaret in the gallery outside. He supposed that when she saw the room full of young men drinking she would not go in. She however did go in, notwithstanding, and in a few moments was followed by other young ladies and their cavaliers, who took seats at different tables, those already sitting there hastening to give them places, and to wait upon them. And now the mirth began to be louder and more enthusiastic. They forgot to imitate Versailles; they talked Swedish, and even Dalecarlian: the voices grew loud; the young ladies drank champagne without making any faces over it, and even took Cyprus wine and port, without any fear of the consequences. There were present brothers and sisters, betrothed lovers, and cousins. It was like one numerous family; and the sexes mingled with a freedom which was innocent, warm-hearted, perhaps a little inelegant, but, on the whole, touching, from its chastity and simplicity.

“What good souls they are!” thought Cristiano. “What the devil is the reason that as soon as they begin to think about themselves they attitudinize as Russians or French, when they appear to so much better advantage in their own natural character?”

The peculiar charm of the little Countess Margaret was exactly that she was herself in whatever circumstances. Mademoiselle Potin had certainly formed her most judiciously, in thus preserving her natural and spontaneous. And what Cristiano found especially agreeable in her was, that she declined wine. Cristiano had some prejudices.

While the rest were all chattering and laughing around Stangstadius,—whose table, always in the same place, and always copiously served, became the centre and target of witticisms, by which he was not at all disconcerted,—Margaret found an opportunity of telling Cristiano in a confidential manner, which, as may be imagined, did not displease him, that her aunt had quite changed her demeanor to her, and, instead of finding fault, had become very good-natured.

“It must be,” she said, “that the baron has not mentioned my discourtesy; or else she knows of it, but means to try a different way to bring me into her plans. At any rate, I have a breathing-time. The baron is not attentive to me any more; and even if I am to be scolded again by my aunt to-morrow, or sent back for penance to my solitude at Dalby, I mean to enjoy myself to-night, and forget all my vexations. Yes, I intend to dance as gayly as I can; for, if you will believe it, Monsieur Goefle, this is the first ball I ever attended in my life; the first time I ever danced anywhere, except in my own room, with my good Potin. I am positively dying to try my little accomplishments in public; and I am frightened to death, at the same time, for fear of being awkward, and getting out in the figures of the French quadrille. I must find some obliging partner who will help me through, and look after me a little, so as to tell me all my mistakes in a charitable way.”

“I believe it will not be difficult to find him,” replied Cristiano; “and if you will venture to trust yourself to me, I guarantee that you shall dance as if you were at your hundredth ball.”

“Well, then, agreed. I accept, with thanks. Let us wait till twelve o’clock. We will make up a little separate ball all by ourselves, with these ladies and gentlemen here, at one end of the gallery. Then, perhaps, my aunt, who is dancing in the grand saloon with all the great people, will not see how suddenly my sprain has got well.”

Cristiano now began a brisk conversation with the young lady; and, being a little stimulated by the champagne, his gayety was gradually taking on a sentimental complexion, when a name, pronounced aloud close to him, made him start and turn around suddenly.

“Christian Waldo!” said a young officer, with an open and good-natured face; “who has seen him? where is he?”

“To be sure!” cried Cristiano, jumping up. “Where is Christian Waldo? Who has seen him?”

“Nobody,” answered some one from another table. “Who has ever seen Christian Waldo’s face, and who will ever see it?”

“You have never seen it, have you, Monsieur Goefle?” asked Margaret of Cristiano. “You do not know him?”

“No. But who is Christian Waldo, and how is it that it is impossible to see his face?”

“You must have heard him spoken of though, for his name seemed to strike you.”

“Yes, because I remember having heard it at Stockholm; but I did not pay much attention to it, and I do not even remember—”

“Come, major,” said a young lieutenant, “since you know this Waldo, tell us who he is, and what he does. I do not know anything about him.”

“Major Larrson knows a great deal if he can do that,” said Margaret. “For my part, I have heard so many different things said about Christian Waldo, that I promise beforehand not to believe a word of anything that is going to be told.”

“But,” replied the major, “I am ready to make oath, upon my honor, that I say nothing about him except what I absolutely know. Christian Waldo is an Italian comedian, who travels about from one town to another, amusing people by his good-natured wit and inexhaustible gayety. His exhibition consists—”

“We know that,” interrupted Margaret, “and we know that he gives his representations sometimes in drawing-rooms and sometimes in taverns; to-day in a castle, and to-morrow in a hovel; and that he makes the rich pay high prices, while he often exhibits to the poor for nothing.”

“An absurd original enough,” said Cristiano; “a kind of mountebank.”

“Mountebank or not, he is an extraordinary man,” replied the major, “and a man of genuine nobility of character, too, which is more! Last month, at Stockholm, I myself saw him fight three furious drunken sailors, one of whom had been cruelly abusing a poor cabin-boy, when Christian Waldo, indignant at the cowardly outrage, rescued his victim. On another occasion, this Christian threw himself into the midst of a fire to save an old woman; and every day he gave away almost all he received to persons who excited his pity. Indeed, it was said that the people of the suburbs were so enthusiastic about him, that he had to leave secretly in order to avoid being carried in a triumphal procession.”

“And also,” observed Margaret, “to avoid being obliged to remove his mask; for the authorities began to feel uneasy about an incognito so very popular, and they fancied he might be some Russian agent who was preparing the ground in this way, so that when the time came he could excite a sedition.”

“Do you believe,” said Cristiano, “that this funny fellow—for it appears that he is a funny fellow—is a Russian spy?”

“I? No, I don’t believe it,” replied Margaret. “I am not one of those people who prefer to think that goodness and charity cover wicked designs.”

“But his mask,” said one of the young ladies, who had been eagerly listening to the officers; “why does he always wear a black mask when he enters his theatre and leaves it? Is it to represent the Italian harlequin?”

“No, for he does not appear himself in the representation which he exhibits to the public. There is some reason, which no person knows.”

“Perhaps,” observed Cristiano, gravely, “it is to hide a leprosy, or something of the kind.”

“Some say his nose is cut off,” remarked one of the young people.

“And others, again,” added a third, “say that he is the handsomest young fellow in the world; and that he has permitted himself to be seen in the faubourg, and by some persons with whom he has formed a friendship.”

“It would appear,” resumed the major, “that he does not wear his mask at all within his own establishment; but reports are very conflicting about his face. A young boatwoman, who was almost ill with curiosity, managed to induce him to remove the mask, and fell quite ill with fright at seeing a death’s head.”

“Certainly this Waldo must be the devil himself,” said Margaret, “if he can appear as a handsome young man or a frightful spectre. Young ladies, don’t you all want to see him?”

“Do you, Margaret?”

“Let’s all confess that we are wild to see him, and that at the same time we are terribly afraid!”

“They say he is coming here, do they not?” asked one of the young girls.

“He is here now, according to the latest accounts,” answered the major.

“What, really?” cried Margaret; “has he come already? Shall we see him? Is he in the ball-room now?”

“Oh,” said Cristiano, “that would be rather a difficult matter.”

“Difficult? Why?”

“Because a mountebank would not venture to present himself in the character of an invited guest, among such a company as this.”

“Bah!” said the major; “it seems the fellow is not afraid to do anything. His mask, his exhibition, and his name, belong together; but it is asserted, and it seems quite probable, that, under another name, and without any mask, he comes and goes as he likes, and goes all over Stockholm; and that, in the public promenades and most frequented taverns, those who talk about him can never be certain that he is not just at their elbow, or perhaps the very person they are speaking to.”

“But then,” said Cristiano, “how do we know that he is not even in this very room?”

“Oh no!” answered Margaret, though not until she had glanced all round the room, “all of us who are here know each other.”

“But I? No one knows me? Perhaps I am Christian Waldo!”

“Then where is your death’s head?” said one of the young girls, laughing. “Without either mask or death’s head, you are only an apocryphal Waldo. And by the way, gentlemen, can any one tell us how it is known that he has arrived?”

“I can tell you,” replied the major, “how I found it out myself. It seems that an unknown person applied for accommodations here, and, the house being full, was directed to the farm-house. He gave his name, and showed the letter in which Johan, the major-domo, by order of his master, the baron, invited him hither for the amusement of the guests here assembled. I don’t know whether they have accommodated him in some corner of the chateau or elsewhere; but it is certain that he has come.”

“Who told you so?”

“The major-domo himself.”

“And he wore his mask?”

“He wore his mask.”

“And is he tall or fat? well formed or bandy?”

“I did not ask any of those questions; for as I saw him with my own eyes at Stockholm—masked, it is true—I know him to be tall, well made, and as lithe as a deer.”

“Probably he may be some ex-rope-dancer,” suggested Cristiano, who appeared to take no more interest in the conversation than politeness required.

“Oh no!” said Margaret; “he has received a capital education. Everybody is struck by the style and wit of his comedies.”

“But how do you know that they are his own?”

“People familiar with all the ancient and modern literatures, assert that nothing in them is stolen; and these little comedies of his—sometimes sentimental, it is said, also—have been a real literary event at Stockholm.”

“Will he exhibit to-morrow, do you think?” was asked on every side.

“It is to be presumed,” replied the major, “but if these young ladies are desirous to know, I shall be very happy to undertake to find him out and inquire.”

“At midnight?” said Cristiano, looking at the clock. “The poor devil is asleep. I believe the Countess Margaret had a more important plan to suggest to the company.”

“Yes, indeed,” cried Margaret. “I want to propose a little ball, all to ourselves. I am a new comer here—a perfect savage, I confess; you have only met me within these two or three days; but every one has been so kind and good to me, that I am not afraid to confess—what M. Goefle will be so good as to tell you—”

“This is it,” said Cristiano. “The Countess Margaret, as she herself just told you, is a perfect savage. She knows nothing in the world, not even how to dance; she is as awkward as possible, and limps at least as much as our illustrious master Stangstadius. Besides, she is clumsy, absent-minded, short-sighted. In fact, it would require a most Christian dose of charity to reconcile one’s self to the idea of dancing with her; for—”

“Enough! enough!” cried Margaret, laughing. “You have done me the honor to describe me with a great deal of humility. Please to accept my thanks, however; for they will all expect something so frightful now, that if I succeed only tolerably well everybody will be enchanted with me. The end of the matter is that I wish to make my first appearance before this small party; and that—if you all say so—we will go and dance in the gallery. The music in the grand saloon will be abundantly loud enough for us to dance by.”

Several of the young men hastened towards Margaret, to ask for her hand. She thanked them, but said that M. Christian Goefle had already devoted himself to be the victim.

“It is quite true, gentlemen,” said Cristiano, gayly, as his gloved hand received the little hand of Margaret; “all please to pity me, and so lead on to the torture.”

Places were taken in an instant, and the quadrille was formed. Margaret begged not to be one of the first four.

“You are curiously agitated,” said Cristiano to her.

“I am,” she replied; “my heart beats as if I were a bird launched out of the nest for the first time, and not quite sure that it has wings at all.”

“The first quadrille,” remarked the adventurer, “is, I see, an important event in the life of a young lady. In a year from now, when you have attended a hundred balls or so, do you suppose you will remember at all the name and face of the humble individual who enjoys the happiness and glory of directing your first dance?”

“Yes, certainly, Monsieur Goefle; the recollection will always be joined to that of the greatest emotions of my life: my fear of the baron, and my joy at being delivered from him, by an effort of courage that I should not have believed myself capable of, and with which I was certainly inspired by your uncle and yourself.”

“But do you know,” said Cristiano, “I am not at all certain of your aversion for the baron?”

“Why not?”

“You are assuredly much more frightened about dancing in public than you were about dancing with him.”

“Yet I did not dance with him, and I am going to dance with you!”

Cristiano involuntarily pressed Margaret’s small fingers; but she thought this merely an intimation that it was time for her to take her place, and, all rosy with pleasure and bashfulness, she stepped forward with him into the joyous circle, where she very quickly found herself entirely at her ease, as her grace and lightness entitled her to be.

“Well, I believe I am not afraid any more,” she said, as they returned to their place, while the other four began the first figure.

“You are a great deal too courageous,” replied Cristiano; “I hoped I should have been of some service, but you have learned so fast how to use your wings, that now you will be flying off with the first comer.”

“It will never be with the baron, though! But tell me why it was that you thought I exaggerated my dislike for him?”

“Mon Dieu! I see that you are passionately fond of balls—that is, of entertainments and luxury; and every passion is followed by certain consequences. Now, if pleasure is the object, wealth is the means of securing it.”

“What? Am I so silly and so homely that I shall never make a rich marriage unless with an old man?”

“Then you admit that you will not marry any one but a rich man?”

“If I should say yes, what would you think of me?”

“I should not think ill of you.”

“I know; I should be doing just as so many others do; and you would not think well of me either.”

This rather delicate discussion was resumed at the third pause of the quartette to which our two young friends belonged. Margaret seemed to want to test Cristiano’s sincerity.

“Confess, now,” she said, “that you despise girls who marry for riches; like Olga, for instance, to whom the baron looks so handsome through the facets of the great diamonds that she dreams about.”

“I despise nothing,” replied the adventurer; “I am naturally tolerant, or else the facets of what virtue I have are dulled by friction with the world. I am enthusiastic for what is superior to the average; and I feel a philosophical indifference to whatever is adapted to the vulgar generality of people.”

“Enthusiastic, do you say? Is not enthusiasm a high price to pay for a thing so natural as disinterestedness? I shall not demand so much of you, Monsieur Goefle; I shall only ask your esteem. I hope you will believe that if I were free to choose, I would consult my heart alone, and not my interest. Even if I could never have any more lace to my sleeves, or satin bows to my dress—even if I could never dance any more in the light of a thousand candles, to the sound of thirty violins, hautboys, and double-basses—I feel that I am capable of making even so immense a sacrifice as that, for the sake of preserving my freedom of opinion and the approbation of my conscience.”

Margaret spoke with enthusiasm. Excited by the dancing, she said just what was in her heart: all the generosity and romance of her nature shone in her brilliant eyes; there was a sort of electrical life and inspiration in her radiant smile; in her attitude, like that of a bird eager to dart upwards again to the clouds; in her lovely fair hair, whose long curls wreathed over her lily-white shoulders as if they were alive; in the heart-felt tone of her voice—in short, in the whole of her charming little person. Cristiano was altogether dazzled, and, without being entirely conscious of what he was saying, he asked Margaret, as if he were dreaming, this strange question:

“You will never permit yourself to love any one not of your own rank, I know. But suppose that, in spite of yourself, you should find your affections drawn towards some poor devil, a person without a name, without a penny—Christian Waldo, for instance—would you not be extremely mortified, and consider it your duty to stifle your inclinations?”

“Christian Waldo!” said Margaret. “Why Christian Waldo? You choose a very strange person as an example!”

“Extremely so, and I do it on purpose. When one proceeds by an antithesis—But come; this is what I mean. Suppose that this Christian Waldo—whom I do not know at all—really possesses the courage, the intelligence, the generosity that have just been attributed to him here; and in addition to his other endowments, the poverty which must be the faithful attendant of his wanderings; and a name which, I presume, he does not claim in virtue of any old parchments.”

“And with his death’s head—”

“No, without his death’s head. Well, suppose that you had no choice of marriage, except between him and the Baron de Waldemora—”

“My choice would be very easily made. I would not marry at all!”

“Unless, of course, it should turn out that Christian’s mask concealed a young and handsome prince, who was obliged to conceal himself for reasons of state?”

“A fine idea that is!” said Margaret; “another Czarewitch Ivan escaped out of his prison, or another Philip III. escaped from his assassins!”

“In that case, apocryphal or not, he would find grace in your eyes.”

“What do you want me to say? An Italian buffoon is really not a good standard of comparison, if you are in earnest.”

“Too true,” replied Cristiano, “and here is the finale; let us tread it lightly, for it is the handful of earth cast upon the romance entitled ‘The First Quadrille’!”

But it was not ordained that this quadrille should end according to choregraphic laws. M. Stangstadius, having at last finished the copious repast, which he called a mere snack between the supper and the after-supper, just at this moment came out from the refreshment-room. Absorbed in some lofty conception awakened in his mind by the agreeable effort of prosperous digestion, and coming upon the young dancers in his progress, he marched unceremoniously straight through them, running against the cavaliers who were just exhibiting their graces in the “forward two,” and treading on the little feet of the ladies as if they had been so many pebbles. His extravagant limping rendered his gait so ridiculous that every one burst out laughing. The dance was quite broken up; and the young couples, taking hold of each other’s hands, executed a rapid and noisy rondo about the chevalier of the polar star, who, not wishing to be behind the others in grace, undertook to execute a hopping movement in the opposite direction, to the immense amusement of the company. But, sad to tell, the laughing and singing became so noisy as to attract attention in the grand saloon.

The orchestra had come to a pause in the music, but the young people did not notice it, and kept on singing and dancing around Stangstadius, who compared himself to Saturn in the middle of his ring.

Countess Elfride hastened to the spot, and, beholding the sudden cure of her niece, fell into a rage, which this time she could not restrain.

“My dear Margaret,” she said, shortly, in a sharp tone, “you are exceedingly imprudent. You forget your sprain; it is extremely dangerous to go on in such a way. I have just seen the baron’s physician, and he prescribes entire quiet to-night. Have the goodness to retire at once with your governess. She will assist you to go to bed, and put on some compresses. Believe me, you had best do so.”

She added in a low tone—

“Obey me!”

Margaret, who had been rosy with delight, turned quite pale, and, whether from anger or mortification, could not restrain two great tears which glittered a moment on her long eye-lashes, and rolled down her cheeks. The Countess Elfride snatched her hand and carried her off, saying, in an under-tone:

“I think you have taken an oath to do nothing to-night but make a fool of yourself. Now you must pay for it. I excused you for not dancing with our entertainer, for he really believes you were in pain; but after that, to dance with another person is to offer the baron an unheard-of, deliberate insult, and I will not allow you to keep up such conduct until he has perceived it.”

Cristiano followed along behind Margaret, trying to think of some means of disarming or diverting the wrath of her aunt, if he should perceive any favorable moment for addressing her, when he saw the baron approaching, and paused, leaning against the pedestal of a statue, to see what would take place among the three.

“What!” said the baron, “you are taking away your niece? It is too early. I thought she was just beginning to enjoy herself in my house. Permit me to beseech your indulgence for her; and since she has been dancing—as I am told—may I now beg her to dance with me? She certainly cannot refuse me now, and I am sure she will consent with pleasure.”

“If you insist upon it, baron, I consent,” said the countess.

“Come, Margaret, thank the baron, and go with him. Do you not see that he is offering you his arm for the polonaise?”

Margaret seemed to hesitate; her eyes met those of Cristiano, who did not know which feeling predominated—his desire to have her remain, or his fear that she would yield. Perhaps the last sentiment was most distinctly expressed in his looks, for Margaret answered steadily that she was engaged.

“To whom, pray?” cried the countess.

“Yes; to whom?” repeated the baron, with a singular inflection in his voice, and with a calmness that, Margaret thought, had something ominous in it.

She looked down, and was silent; for she did not understand what was passing in the mind of her persecutor, from whom she had thought herself quite safe.

The baron’s only object was to torment her and compromise her. He saw perfectly well her aversion for him, and cordially reciprocated it. Coldly hard-hearted and revengeful, he affected to jest; but said, speaking loud enough to be heard by many inquisitive ears:

“Where is the happy mortal with whom I must dispute you? for I certainly will do it. I have the right.”

“You have the right?” exclaimed Margaret, amazed and indignant; “you, baron?”

“Yes, I,” he answered, with cold, cruel irony; “you know very well I have. Come, where is this rival who is going to carry you off to dance from under my very beard?”

“Here!” exclaimed Cristiano, losing his self-control, and advancing upon the baron in a threatening manner, while all the spectators, stupefied into silence, looked on with curiosity and amazement.

It was very well known that the baron, in spite of his sluggish and blasé manner, was extremely irascible, and indomitably proud. Every one expected a violent scene; and, in fact, a greenish pallor overspread instantaneously the baron’s face, and he opened and shut his large and short-sighted eyes, as if to emit a flash of lightning for the annihilation of the audacious unknown who defied him so openly. But instantly the blood rushed back to his forehead, on which one large, engorged vein rose like a ridge, while his lips became more livid than the rest of his face. An indistinct cry escaped him, his arms extended convulsively, and he fell forward, exclaiming:

“There it is! There it is!”

He would have fallen upon the floor, had not twenty arms interposed. He had fainted; and they carried him to a window, and unceremoniously broke the panes to give him fresh air. Olga made her way through the crowd to bear him assistance. Margaret disappeared as if her aunt had whisked her off by conjuration; and Cristiano was rapidly led away by Major Osmund Larrson, who had taken a great liking to him.

“Come along with me,” said the good-natured young fellow; “I must speak with you.”

In a few moments Cristiano and Osmund were alone in an antique room on the ground-floor, warmed by an immense fire-place.

“We can smoke here,” said the major. “Here’s a rack, well filled; suit yourself with a pipe, and here’s the tobacco. That beer on the table is the best in the country, and here’s some capital old Dantzic brandy. My comrades will be down in a moment to tell us the latest news of the affair.”

“My dear major,” said Cristiano, “I see you think me extremely angry, but you are mistaken. Let the baron get over his attack; I will smoke here with you until he is ready for an explanation.”

“But for what purpose? to fight a duel?” said the major. “Bah! The baron never fights; he never has fought. You do not know him at all, then?”

“Not at all,” said Cristiano, calmly, as he smoked his pipe, and poured out a large goblet of beer. “Have I really, like a true Don Quixote, attacked a windmill? I did not know that I was making such a fool of myself.”

“You have done nothing of the kind, my dear friend. Quite the contrary, many persons will think that you have been exceedingly audacious to oppose the Snow Man; and certainly that is my opinion.”

“I should have thought that a man of snow would easily thaw.”

“That is not the case in this country. Men of that kind remain standing a long time.”

“I have been heroic, then, without knowing it.”

“You must try and not find it out at your own expense. The baron does not fight, it is true; but he takes his revenge for all that, and he never forgets an injury. It doesn’t matter where you may be, he will pursue you with his hate; and it doesn’t matter what career you may want to follow, he will put obstacles in your way. If you get into some difficulty, as may happen to any high-spirited young fellow, he will contrive to make it dangerous for you; and if he once has you thrown into prison, there you will remain. My advice to you, therefore, is to depart at once, and to remain constantly on your guard as long as you live; at least, unless the devil chooses to wring the neck of his crony this very night, under the pretence of a fit of apoplexy.”

“Do you think the baron so ill?” inquired Cristiano.

“We shall soon know all about it. Here is my lieutenant, Erwin Osburn, who is my best friend, and who likes you as well as I do. How now, lieutenant, what is the latest news of the Snow Man? Are there any signs that the thaw is approaching?”

“No, it turns out to be nothing at all,” replied the lieutenant; “or, anyhow, so he pretends. He went to his room for a moment, and returned with such a good color, that I suspect him of daubing his pale cheeks with rouge. His eyes are dull, however, and he hesitates in speaking. I was curious enough to go up to him; and taking this as a mark of respect, he condescended to inform me that it was his wish that the dancing should go on, and that people should pay no further attention to him. He is seated in the grand drawing-room, and what convinces me that he is more uncomfortable than he confesses is, that he seems entirely to have forgotten the outbreak of rage that threw him into this fine state, and that nobody ventures to remind him of it.”

“Then the ball will go on,” said the major, “and you will see that it will be gayer than ever. It seems as if the people here wanted to shake off the thought of some approaching catastrophe, or as if the baron’s heirs could not contain their joy at finding that he is really ill, and has been so for some time. But you must tell us one thing, Christian Goefle. Under what form did you appear to the baron? or what spell did you cast over him? Are you a ghost or a sorcerer? Are you the man of the lake, who fascinates people with a look of his icy eyes? What is there in common between the baron and yourself, and why is it that he should have uttered, in swooning, his famous exclamation, which I heard to-day for the first time: ‘There it is! there it is!’”

“I wish you would explain it to me,” replied Cristiano; “for I have been trying in vain to recall where I could have seen him; if we ever did meet, the circumstances must have been very insignificant, since my memory of them is so confused. Let me see, has he been travelling in France or Italy since—”

“Oh, it is a long, long time since he left the north!”

“I am mistaken, then; I have never seen the baron before to-day. And yet one would have said that he recognized me. May he not have been delirious when he cried: ‘There it is! there it is!’”

“Oh, that is a sure thing,” said the major. “I have a gardener in my bostoelle,[4] who was at one time one of his servants, and who has told me a good many curious things about him. The baron is subject to violent attacks, which his physician calls nervous attacks, and which come from a chronic liver complaint. While these spells last, he sometimes shows signs of the strangest fear. He, the sceptic, the jeering infidel, is as cowardly as a child. He sees ghosts, especially that of a woman, and it is at such moments that he cries: ‘There it is! there it is!’ meaning, I suppose, ‘There, my fit is seizing me!’ or, perhaps, ‘There is the ghost that haunts me!’”

“He seems to be tormented by remorse.”

“Some say it is the recollection of his sister-in-law.”

“Whom he assassinated?”

“They don’t say that he killed her, but merely that he caused her to disappear.”

“Yes, that is a more elegant expression.”

“It is quite possible that there is no foundation for either story,” resumed the major. “The fact is that we don’t know anything at all about it, and that the baron is perhaps perfectly innocent of a great many crimes of which he is accused. You know that we are living here on the classical soil of the marvellous. The Dalecarlians have the greatest horror of anything practical, and of natural explanations. You cannot strike against a stone in this country, without supposing that a goblin pushed it against you on purpose; if your nose itches, you must run to a sibyl to be cured of a dwarf’s poisonous bite; nor is there a driver who will mend the broken trace of a carriage or sleigh without saying, ‘Come, come, little goblin, leave us alone; we are not doing you any harm.’”

“You can readily imagine that the Baron de Waldemora could not become very rich, in the midst of such a superstitious people, without being considered an alchemist. Instead of supposing him to be paid by the empress for sustaining her political interests, it was thought more natural to accuse him of magic; and from this accusation to that of the blackest crimes there is only a single step. Every sorcerer drowns his victims in waterfalls, buries them in abysses, rides avalanches, attends the witches’ Sabbath, and at the very least eats human flesh, being thought quite moderate in his ferocious appetites if he only sucks the blood of infants. For my part, I have heard so many stories that I discredit them all, and confine myself to believing what I know; and what I know is, that the baron is a wicked man, too cowardly to strike another man; too well-fed and fastidious to drink blood; too cold-blooded to lie in wait for travellers under frozen lakes; but quite capable of sending his best friend to the gallows, if he had any personal interest in doing so, and had only to utter some wicked calumny to accomplish his purpose.”

“He is a great villain!” said Cristiano. “But allow me to express my surprise at seeing so many respectable persons at his house—”

“You are right,” replied Osmund, without giving him time to continue. “We are unquestionably to blame for coming to amuse ourselves at the entertainments of a man whom we all hate. You have for an excuse that you don’t know him, but as for the rest of us—”

“I did not make any personal allusions,” rejoined Cristiano.

“I know it, my dear fellow; but you should not be surprised to find that a tyrant has a court. You are, of course, familiar with the history of your country; but as you have been absent a number of years, you may have thought that the progress of philosophy has established a little equality between the different orders of the state. It is not so at all, Christian Goefle, not at all; as you will soon see with your own eyes. The nobility is all-powerful; then comes the clergy, enlightened and austere, but also tyrannical and intolerant. The bourgeoise, so useful in the state, and so patriarchal in their manners, count for little, the peasantry for nothing at all, and the king for less than nothing. When a nobleman is rich, which luckily is very rare, he controls the interests and destinies of his whole province, and he either makes men do as he chooses or ruins them. You may rest assured that this would be the case with us young officers, if we should offer any discourtesy to the illustrious Seigneur de Waldemora. It is true that he could not deprive us of our rank, which can only be forfeited in case of actual crime; but, in spite of the inviolable laws of the indelta, we should be forced, by unheard-of persecutions, to abandon our cantonments, houses, estates and friends, as if we were a simple garrison.”

At this moment two other young men came in to smoke, and Cristiano ventured to ask them whether Countess Elfride had returned to the ball-room.

“You are a sly fellow!” replied one of them; “you will not persuade us that you take such an interest in the wicked Countess Elfride. As for her lovely niece, she disappeared at the same time with yourself, and her aunt pretends that she is very lame.”

“Disappeared, did you say?” cried Cristiano, unreasonably alarmed at the word.

“Come!” said the major, good-humoredly, “do you feel uneasy about your beauty, my dear Goefle?”

“Excuse me, I have no right to speak so of Countess Margaret. She is certainly beautiful; but, unfortunately for me, she is not mine in any sense of the word.”

“I meant no harm,” replied Osmund, “I merely saw, like everybody else, that she selected you for the partner of her first dance, and that you seemed to be chatting together in a very friendly way. If you are not in love with her you make a mistake, upon my honor, and if she don’t feel some little weakness for you, perhaps she also makes a mistake, for we all think you a capital fellow.”

“It would be altogether a mistake in me,” replied Cristiano, “to aspire to a star too far above me.”

“Bah! because you have no title? But your family has been ennobled, and your uncle, the lawyer, is a distinguished man in talent and character. He is quite as rich, moreover, as the beautiful Margaret. Love removes all obstacles, and if you have disagreeable relations, you can swear fidelity in secret. In our country, such betrothals are as sacred as any, and so, if you want to carry your point, we are all ready to help you.”

“To help me in what?” said Cristiano, laughing.

“To an immediate interview with the countess, unknown to her aunt. Well, comrades, what say you? here are four of us all ready. For my part, I know where their rooms are, and we can go there without a moment’s delay. If Mademoiselle Potin is frightened—pay her compliments, which she really deserves, as to that, for she is a charming person; and if a chambermaid screams, kiss her, and promise her ribbons for her hair. Then we demand a serious conversation with the Countess Margaret for Christian Goefle, in the name of M. Goefle, his uncle, from whom he brings an important communication! Ha!—that’s it. They will introduce us—but of course without our pipes—into a little drawing-room, where we will sit down quietly apart, while Christian Goefle addresses la diva contessina in a low voice, and offers her his heart; or, if he is too timid to do that, lets her divine what his sentiments really are, while he inquires about the dangers with which the peerless little lady is beset, and arranges with her to avert them. I am not laughing, gentlemen. It is quite evident that Madame d’Elveda wants to force the inclination of her ward, and that the cunning Olaus is trying to compromise her, so as to drive off all other suitors. Very well; the situation is magnificent for the man, who, in a crowded ball-room, took up the gauntlet for the victim of this odious and ridiculous plot. Come, Christian! come, gentlemen, are you ready? Parbleu! You shall have your turn! Another time, Christian, you shall be the one to assist us in love affairs as virtuous as your own; we ought to be able to rely upon each other to that extent, we young folks. In Heaven’s name, what would have become of us before now, if we were not all devoted friends and confidants? Forward! To the assault of the citadel. Follow me, if you love me!”

All started up, even Cristiano himself, for he could not help being carried away by the proposition, but he paused at the door of the room, and stopped the others.

“Thanks, gentlemen,” he said, “and depend upon it that I will go through fire for you when necessary, but I have no right to introduce this sweet romance into my life. Nothing in the conduct of Countess Margaret authorized me to undertake her defence, which I did in a moment of thoughtless indignation, and I have no reason now to hope that she thanks me for my interference. She may be offended, on the contrary; and it belongs to M. Goefle the lawyer, and to him alone, to protect her from her aunt, by acquainting her with her rights. The best thing for me to do, since my beautiful partner has left off dancing, and my terrible rival does not fight, is to go and have a good sleep, of which I am really very much in need, since I have been upon my feet for more than twenty-four hours.”

Cristiano’s sentiments were approved of, and he was loudly applauded for his gallantry. They tried to make him stop and drink with them, supposing this to be an irresistible temptation, but Cristiano was sober, as the inhabitants of warm countries usually are. The night was advancing, and he thought it more prudent to put an end to the comedy performed hitherto with so much success. He shook hands with his new friends, bade them adieu, promised to return to breakfast while inwardly resolving to do nothing of the kind, and without giving them time to inquire what part of the new chateau he was stopping in, returned lightly and mysteriously over the frozen lake.

It was on purpose that he left Loki, and the sleigh of the doctor of laws, at the new chateau; he was afraid that they would be heard, and cause him to be observed. He walked along the shore, until too far to be seen from the windows of the chateau, and then crossed to the door of Stollborg, which he had left open, and which no one, Ulphilas least of all, had thought of coming to fasten.

He took these precautions, because, to the pale light of the moon, which was no longer visible, had succeeded the fleeting but brilliant splendor of a magnificent aurora borealis. It was magnificent, at all events, for this region, although it is quite probable that it would have been a very ordinary display at a higher degree of north latitude; and yet the illumination towards the polar regions must have been unusually vivid at this moment, for it lighted up the whole country, and every object around the frozen lake. The snow, under its varying reflections, was showing a fantastic and magnificent succession of red and blue colors, and Cristiano, before entering the bear-room, remained for several moments at the door of the court, unable, in spite of the cold and solitude, to tear himself from this wonderful spectacle.

[4] The bostoelle of the officers of the indelta is a house and lands, which they have the use of, and whose rent is proportioned to their rank. This rent is their salary. The minister’s house is also called his bostoelle, and the minister has the use of it besides his other perquisites. The soldier of the indelta has his torp, his little house with a garden and a few acres of land. The indelta is a rural army, whose excellent organization was formed by Charles XII., and to which there is nothing analogous elsewhere.

[V.]

IT was eight o’clock next morning when M. Goefle awoke. Probably he had not rested as well as usual during the night, for he was habitually an early riser, and was quite scandalized to find himself abed at such an hour. It is true that he had reckoned upon little Nils to wake him, but Nils was still sound asleep, and, after several attempts to arouse him, M. Goefle concluded to let him lie as long as he chose. This was not ill-temper on the part of the doctor of laws, but simply complete despair of obtaining any service from his valet-de-chambre. Resigning himself to necessity, therefore, he lighted his own fire, and then proceeded, like a methodical man as he was, by the light of a candle, which somehow seemed to be asleep standing, to shave, and to comb and curl his wig as carefully, and as well too, as if all his conveniences had been at hand. Lastly, having completed his toilet, all except his coat, which was ready to slip on in case of need, he wound up his watch, looked out at the sky, saw that there was not yet the least trace of sunrise, put on his dressing-gown, and, opening the two intermediate doors, prepared to put things in order in his saloon, the bear-room, intending to go to work there, quietly and comfortably, until breakfast-time.

But as he approached the stove, holding up his hand between his eyes and the flickering light of his candle, he started to see a human figure lying down between the stove and himself, the body sunk into the large arm-chair, the head lying over backwards upon the stuffed back, and the legs, thrust at a level with the body, into the large opening for hot air just above the grate of the stove.

“Hallo! What a sleeping beauty!” exclaimed the advocate; “he has really a superb face!” and he stopped to look at Cristiano, who was sleeping peacefully and profoundly. “It is some young gentleman or other who has run away to this old place from the noise and confusion of the new chateau, as I did. Well, I hoped I should be alone in this cursed hole, at any rate; but, if I can’t, I must make up my mind to have company, I suppose. Fortunately this young man looks agreeable. The poor fellow must have been very careful, for he made not the least noise, and did not hunt at all for any better bed than that arm-chair, which must be breaking him in two across the loins!”

Then M. Goefle touched lightly the cheek of Cristiano, who motioned as if driving off a fly, but did not wake up.

“He is warm enough, at any rate,” said the lawyer again. “That’s a capital furred cloak—just like my travelling-cloak; why, it’s exactly like it! Where is mine, by the way? Oh, I see; he found it on the chair, and just put it on. Faith, he was quite right. I should have made him perfectly welcome to it; indeed, I would have given him the other bed in my room, and Master Nils should have been obliging enough to sleep on the sofa. I am sorry the young man thought it necessary to be so particular! Really altogether too particular, I must say! A well-bred fellow, too, that’s evident; and careful of his toilet, for he took his coat off when he went to sleep; that’s a mark of a good, steady character. Let’s see what can be our young friend’s profession: a black coat—quite like my own best dress-coat—so very like it that it is mine, for there’s my own handkerchief perfumed with musk, and—ah! he has been using my invitation to the ball. And my white gloves! where are my white gloves? On the floor!—just where they ought to be, too, for they are entirely spoiled. Ah, ah, my fine fellow, you are not so ceremonious as I thought! indeed, I can venture to assert that you make yourself very much at home. You lose your baggage, or you don’t take the trouble to unpack, and you help yourself to whatever you think proper out of mine. Young people play such tricks on one another, I know. I remember a certain ball at Christiania, where I danced all night in poor Stangstadius’s clothes, and he had to lie abed until I came back—and all next day too, for I let them carry me off. But nonsense! we were young then. At my age it will not do to allow that sort of fun—to other people. Hallo, hallo, monsieur! Wake up! Give me my breeches and silk stockings! God pardon me, what a quantity of stitches the young animal has started in dancing! And he won’t even condescend to open his eyes!”

As he made these observations in rapid succession, M. Goefle at last espied the clothes that Cristiano had laid off the evening before, and which, overcome by sleep at his return, he had left upon another chair. The threadbare trousers, the equally worn Venetian cloak, and the famous corded Tyrolian hat, launched M. Goefle upon a new sea of conjectures. Could this handsome young man, with his distinguished face and well-shaped hands, be some mere Bohemian, a bear-leader perhaps, a travelling pedler, a wandering singer? An Italian singer, possibly? No; his face was unmistakably a Dalecarlian one. A conjurer—perhaps a good deal too skilful in the line of his profession? No; for M. Goefle found his purse all safe in his trunk, and the sleeper’s face was an extremely honest one. He slept the sleep of innocence, too, most assuredly.

What was to be supposed, and what was to be done? The lawyer scratched his head. Possibly this wretched costume was a disguise which the young man had assumed to conceal himself while running about to play the Don Juan under the balcony of some pretty visitor at the new chateau. But finding none of his guesses satisfactory, M. Goefle finally set to work in earnest to awaken his visitor, shaking him repeatedly, and bawling into his ear, “Here, here, hallo! I say! Come, neighbor, wake up!” and such other exclamations as impatient people use for the benefit of obstinate sleepers.

Cristiano at last opened his eyes, looked fixedly at M. Goefle without seeing him, and with a truly Olympian calmness shut them again.

“Ah, there you go again,” said the lawyer, “off to dream-land!”

“What is it? What’s the matter? Does the aurora borealis last yet?” asked Cristiano, whose half sleep was evidently cradled in pleasant dreams.

“Where can you get an aurora borealis at this time of day?” asked M. Goefle; “it’s just before sunrise.”

“The sun? What is the use of talking about the sun in the middle of a ball?” asked Cristiano, in the coaxing voice of a sleeper who is begging to be let alone.

“Yes, that’s it; the ball, my coat, the sun, my small-clothes, the aurora borealis,” replied M. Goefle, “all very logical and well connected in your dreams, no doubt, my good friend, but I want you to give a better account of yourself, and I shall keep on shaking you until you can make out a more satisfactory case than that.”

Good-natured Cristiano submitted to the shaking with incomparable meekness. The habit he had acquired of sleeping on the first board he came to, whether at sea in all sorts of weather or on the road in all sorts of vehicles, rendered even the vigorous rocking which the lawyer was bestowing upon him rather agreeable than otherwise; it was just sufficient to make him pleasantly conscious that he was in a state of repose. Gradually, however, the idea made its way into his mind, of ascertaining what place he was in. He opened his eyes, looked at the stove, turned about and gazed, as if to question the sombre walls of the room.

“Deuce take me!” he exclaimed, “if I know where I am. But, after all, what difference does it make? Here to-day, somewhere else to-morrow! Such is life!”

“Please to take the trouble, at least,” said the lawyer, “to observe in whose company you are.”

Well satisfied with this dignified command, M. Goefle waited for the surprise, or terror, or confusion, which were to appear in the face of the delinquent, but in vain. Cristiano rubbed his eyes, looked upon him with a smile, and observed in the most affable manner:

“A very good face, yours, sir! What do you want of me?”

“What do I want of you?” exclaimed M. Goefle, with some indignation; “I want my fur cloak, my cap, my waistcoat, my shirt, my slippers;—I want everything of mine that you have clothed and ornamented your lovely person with.”

“Bah! bah! What makes you think so? You are dreaming, my good man!” said the adventurer, raising himself to a sitting posture, and looking with astonishment upon his borrowed wardrobe. Then, laughing, as he began confusedly to remember the night’s transactions, he continued:

“Upon my word, Monsieur Goefle—it is that very respectable and eminent gentleman to whom I have the honor of speaking, is it not?”

“I have every reason to believe so, monsieur. Well, then?—”

“Well, then,” replied Cristiano, rising promptly and removing the doctor’s cap from his own head, with perfect courtesy, “I have to beg a thousand pardons—though at the same time I do not merit a single one. Please to consider, sir—I am a young man, and just at this moment quite destitute. A romantic notion led me to the ball last night, and I found no decent clothes within my reach except these, which Providence seemed to have sent on purpose. I am perfectly cleanly, and in perfect health; and moreover, if you should object to wear the clothes after me, I shall be able to-morrow to pay you for them, whatever price you choose to value them at.”

“A good joke that would be! Do you take me for a tailor?”

“By no means; but I should be extremely pained to be thought a thief. That is not my character at all.”

“Faith, I see that you are an honest young fellow—but you are very thoughtless. Still, even if I were inclined to be angry, the thing is done, and can’t be helped. I see very well that your health is good, for, by Jove, you have a magnificent color! And what hair! Ah, my fine fellow, I recognize the perfume of my hair-powder! But how the devil did you get into the ball-room without an invitation? for your style of travelling-dress does not indicate—”

“That I belong in good society, you were going to say? Oh, say so! I am not all susceptible on that point.”

“But, after all, I don’t know anything about it. The clothes don’t make the man. You have a very aristocratic hand. Come—out with it! Who are you? If there’s a romance, I’m fond of romantic stories; and if there’s a secret—well, your face pleases me, and I promise to be as discreet—as discreet as a lawyer—more could not be said.”

“I do not doubt your discretion, Monsieur Goefle,” said Cristiano, “and besides, I have no secrets that I need hesitate to reveal to a man of sense and character; but I give you notice that my story is rather long, and the stove is almost entirely cold. And to tell you the truth, although I had a very good supper last night, my appetite always wakes up as soon as I do; and I already feel some twinges.”

“How do you suppose I feel, then?” said the lawyer; “for I am always in the habit of taking my tea in bed, as soon as I wake. That blockhead of an Ulphilas has abandoned me altogether. There are the very same dishes on the table that were there last night.”

“Thanks to me, then, Monsieur Goefle; for I recognize the same ham and fish that I purloined out of the kitchen of your friend M. Ulph—what is his name?”

“Ulph; for Ulphilas. Yes, that is quite correct. Hereabouts, they abridge all names. They make monosyllables of them all, apparently for fear that otherwise, when they called anybody, half of his name should freeze in the air. If I am indebted to you for my supper, then, I must conclude that this said Ulph would have let me perish of hunger—he! he!—in this very room, about which there is already one story of the kind. Perhaps the rascal meant to leave me to the same fate, so as to make sure that the room should deserve its reputation.”

“Is it the Baroness Hilda who starved to death here, Monsieur Goefle?”

“Ah, you have heard of it, then? It is only a story, thank God! Let us think about our breakfast. I will call some one.”

“No, Monsieur Goefle. Ulph will certainly come immediately. Besides, if you want anything more, let me go and get it. There’s nothing like choosing your own bill of fare; but this bear’s ham, or boar’s ham, this smoked tongue and roast game, which you hardly began on last night—don’t they appeal to you any longer this morning?”

“Of course they do—of course; and there’s more here now than we two can eat. Well, as the table is set, shall we take breakfast, hey?”

“That will suit me exactly; but allow me to step into a corner and make my toilette—or rather to unmake it, for I am still—”

“In my clothes? I see that well enough. Well, as you are in them, stay there. Only, take the pelisse off and put the coat on, or you will be smothered while you are eating.”

Cristiano first refurnished the stove with fuel, and lighted it. Then, having washed his hands and face with much care and neatness in a corner of the room, he took his place, and began to carve the cold meats in a style that showed him to be a master of the art.

“It’s curious,” remarked M. Goefle; “you have what they would call in France the manner of a perfect gentleman, and yet that old coat of yours there—”

“Indicates misfortune, and not poverty,” answered the adventurer, quietly. “Eight days ago I was very decently equipped, and could have appeared at the ball without any embarrassment.”

“Very possibly,” said M. Goefle, seating himself, and beginning to make good use of his handsome teeth; “just as it is quite possible that you are getting ready for one more of those romances that travelling adventurers excel in. It is all the same to me, if it is amusing.”

“Come,” said Cristiano, laughing, “in what language shall I recite my tale?”

“Faith, in Swedish, as that is your own language. You are a Swede, and a Dalecarlian too; I see that plainly enough, by your face.”

“But I am not Swedish, though; Icelandic, rather.”

“Rather? are you not sure?”

“Not the least in the world. Therefore, as Latin is the universal language, if you please—”

And Cristiano continued in elegant and correct Latin, speaking it with the greatest facility.

“Very well done, indeed!” said the advocate, who had listened kindly and attentively; “but your Italian pronunciation hinders me a little in following your Latin.”

“Probably there would be the same difficulty in Greek and German,” suggested Cristiano, changing first to the dead, and then to the living, language, with equal ease and correctness, and interspersing with his discourse quotations enough to prove that he was versed in both ancient and modern literature.

“Bravo!” cried the doctor; “you are a highly educated young fellow, I see. And French—do you know that also?”

“French and English, at your service,” said Cristiano. “I was taught them all; and my own preference led me to the study of languages.”

“Well, then, speak French,” said M. Goefle, who was hardly less of a polyglot than Cristiano. “I love Italy, but I adore France. She is our ally, useful or not; and, above all, she is the antagonist of Russia, which I hold in execration.”

“Great heavens! so do I. I am anti-Russian ever since I came into Sweden; and especially since last evening. But now, doctor, permit me to beg you not to take me for a pedant. The reason that I ventured to display my poor acquirements before a Professor of the Faculty of Lund is, that when you saw me carving that ham rather skilfully, you asked, in your own mind, whether I was not an ex-steward or butler from a good family, discharged in disgrace, and on the lookout for victims.”

“There now! Did you really guess that that idea was passing through my mind? Well, I confess it; and I see now that if you have been employed in good families, it has by no means been in a lackey’s place.”

“Oh, Mon Dieu, monsieur!” answered Cristiano; “lackey or professor, it is very much the same thing with some people, except the difference of a grade more or less.”

“Oh no! not in Sweden, my friend; the devil! no indeed; not here.”

“I know it, monsieur. Your people are fond of profound studies, and the promotion of knowledge is nowhere more nobly encouraged; but in other countries it often happens—”

Here Cristiano was interrupted by the entrance of Ulphilas with breakfast. Seeing the table already set, he halted in stupid astonishment.

“You see, blockhead,” cried M. Goefle, gayly, guessing the reason of his surprise, “my kobold has waited on me in your place; and it’s well for me he did, for you have left me entirely alone this twelve hours.”

Ulph, or Ulf—for there is sufficient authority for either form of the word—tried to excuse himself; but the consolation which he had sought in the bottle the evening before had entirely obscured his faculties, and he found it very hard to give any reasons for his neglect. As a general thing, Ulph became comfortable enough in his mind by day-break, and for the five hours or thereabouts following the late sunrise of winter, he was no more cowardly or awkward than other people. His excessive libations had, no doubt, an effect upon his dull brains at all times; but as he could nevertheless perform his domestic duties with the proper mechanical regularity, this was neither troublesome to others nor disquieting to himself. On the present occasion, he stammered, in the Dalecarlian dialect, some words of stupid surprise at seeing the dishes displayed upon the table, and an unknown individual seated with the doctor.

“Come,” said the doctor, “wait upon this gentleman as you do upon myself. He is a friend of mine whom I have accommodated in my lodging.”

“Yes, sir,” said Ulph, “I have nothing to say against that; but the thing is that the horse—”

“Horse yourself!” exclaimed Cristiano, who had already picked up somewhere a few words of Dalecarlian, and who saw himself threatened by a terrible revelation.

“Yes, sir, horse myself,” replied Ulph, with resignation. “But the sleigh—”

“What about the sleigh?” said the doctor; “have you cleaned it? Have you rubbed down my horse?”

The word horse again striking Cristiano’s ear, he turned towards Ulph, and looked at him, aside, with such a terrific expression, that the poor stupefied fellow, quite losing his self-command, stammered in reply:

“Yes, yes, sir; horse, sleigh. It’s all right.”

“Very well, then, go on with the breakfast,” said the doctor, reassured. “Give us the tobacco, Ulph, and let the tea-kettle alone. We will make the tea for ourselves.”

As Ulph accordingly turned to the stove to set down the tea-kettle, Cristiano stepped after him, as if to superintend the operation, and turning towards him, said in his ear, in Dalecarlian, and with another terrifying glance:

“Horse, sleigh, new chateau—quick!”

Upon this Ulph took it into his head that in his drunkenness he must have received some orders which he had not executed; so he hurried off, put on his skates, and went over to the new chateau to look for Loki through the noisy stables, overcrowded with grooms and horses.

Our doctor of laws did not eat so gluttonously as the doctor of sciences, Stangstadius. He took his time, and savored and passed judgment upon every dish, according to the great principles which govern the application of the culinary art to the lofty needs of the choicer class of stomachs. At the end of a further half hour of conversation, with experiments, on the subject, he and Cristiano, as they looked at each other, perceived each a rosy reflection upon the other’s face.

“There it is at last!” said the doctor; “the sun is just coming above the horizon.”

He looked at his watch.

“A quarter before ten,” he observed. “Come, this Mora watch does very well. See, this is of home manufacture. Our Dalecarlians make everything. They make all their own tools, from the simplest to the most complicated. But don’t put out the candle, it will be convenient while we are smoking; and besides, in the winter, I like to watch the doubtful, fantastic mingling of the sunlight and the artificial light struggling together in the room. Why, the clock’s striking! You wound it up last evening, then?”

“Certainly. Did you not observe it?”

“I did not observe anything. I was sleeping while standing up, or else I was dreaming. Perhaps it is only a dream that I came in here and took supper. No matter. Can you make tea?”

“No; but coffee to perfection.”

“Very well, make some. I will take charge of the tea.”

“Are you fond of such an insipid, melancholy drink?”

“Yes,—diluted with a full third of brandy or old rum.”

“Ah, that makes a difference! Doctor, I am surprised at finding here a table as well spread as if at Paris or London.”

“Well, why not? Are we at the end of the world? It is only six hours’ sail to Prussia, where they live just as they do in Paris.”

“Yes; but off at the furthest end of this province, sixty or seventy leagues away inland, and in so poor a country—”

“So poor! Do you think a country must be poor because it is not well adapted to tillage? You forget that, amongst us, wealth lies under the ground, not above it; and that the mines of Dalecarlia are the very treasury of Sweden. You have noticed that this region, bordering on Norway, is thinly peopled, and you have concluded that it would not support a larger population. Let me tell you that if the government only knew how to develop its resources, and had the power to do so, our mineral wealth would afford the means of increasing a hundredfold our prosperity, and the number of our inhabitants. One day, things will go better with us, if we can only escape, on the one hand, from the claws of England, whose intrigues oppress us, and, on the other, from the pincers of Russia, who paralyzes us with her threats. In the meanwhile, my son, understand that if there are poor people amongst us, it is not the fault of this good land of God’s, so much calumniated by the ignorance, indifference, or false notions of the men who inhabit it. People here complain of the severity of the winter and the hardness of the rocks. But there is a warm heart down underneath in the earth! Dig down anywhere, yes, I guarantee you, anywhere, and you will come upon some of the innumerable veins of valuable metals that ramify throughout beneath our feet. With those metals we can buy all the rarities, all the luxuries, all the productions of Europe, if we only have arms enough to lift the wealth to the surface of the ground. We complain of the earth, when it is men who are wanting. It is she who ought to complain of us, rather!”

“God forbid that I should speak ill of Sweden, my dear Monsieur Goefle! I only say that there are great areas of land lying uncultivated and waste, and that what few inhabitants there are, are so frugal that the traveller can find nothing at all to eat except gruel and milk;—healthful food, no doubt, but not much calculated to stimulate the imagination or to give energy to the character.”

“There you completely deceive yourself again, my dear fellow! This region may be called the very head and heart of Sweden; an enthusiastic head, full of strange poetry, and sublime or graceful imaginations; an ardent and generous heart, where the main artery of patriotism is throbbing. Are you familiar with its history?”

“Yes indeed! Gustavus Vasa, Gustavus Adolphus, Charles XII., all the Swedish heroes, have always found men in the heart of these mountains, though all the rest of the nation might be enslaved or corrupted. It is this glorious nook of the earth, this Switzerland of the north, that in every great crisis has supplied loyalty, energy, and salvation to the country.”

“Very well said! Well then, admit that the national gruel and barren and icy rocks may bring forth and train up poets and heroes!”

As he said this, the doctor of laws drew his soft wadded dressing-gown around him, and poured into his boiling hot and well-sweetened cup of tea, a half-glass of the best quality of rum. Cristiano was enjoying the flavor of an exquisite cup of Mocha, and they both burst out laughing at their enthusiasm for the cold of the mountains and the gruel of hovels.

“Ah!” said M. Goefle, becoming serious again, “the fact is, we are degenerate men. We must have our stimulants and tonics nowadays. That proves that the most accomplished or the most famous of us all is inferior to the lowest peasant of these savage mountains. But will not that animal of an Ulphilas bring us any tobacco? That fellow is a perfect brute!”

Cristiano laughed again, and M. Goefle, perceiving the inconsistency of eulogizing sobriety and equality just at that moment, allowed himself to be appeased, especially when he espied the tobacco-jar at his elbow. Ulph had brought it, with his usual mechanical precision, and had omitted to say so, from his utter lack of spontaneity.

“Well, come,” said M. Goefle—extending himself in the arm-chair for more commodious digestion, and smoking a magnificent Turkish pipe, whose bowl he rested upon a projection of the stove, while Cristiano, sometimes standing, sometimes sitting, sometimes astride his chair, smoked his short travelling-pipe with more speed and less tranquillity—“come, my problematic comrade, tell me this true history of yours, if you can.”

“Here it is, then,” said Cristiano. “My name is—or at least I go by the name of Cristiano del Lago!”

“Chrétien du Lac? Christian of the Lake? Why so romantic a name?”

“Ah, there you have me! Chi lo sa? Who knows? as they say in my country. It is altogether a romance, no doubt, without a word of truth in it. I will tell it to you as it was told to me.

“In some country—I don’t know what—by the side of a lake whose name I have never known, a lady—ugly or handsome, rich or poor, noble or plebeian—either in consequence of a legitimate connection or of an unfortunate mischance—gave birth to an infant whose existence, it seems, it was very necessary to conceal. By means of a cord and a basket—these details were told me with much precision—this lady, or her confidential companion, lowered the poor little new-born child into a boat, waiting below either by chance, or in pursuance of some arrangement made secretly. As to the lady, I have never met any one who could inform me what became of her; and where should I have made inquiries? As to the child, it was carried away secretly, I do not know whither, and maintained, I do not know how, until old enough to be weaned, when it was carried away again, I don’t know by whom, into another country—”

“I don’t know what!” said M. Goefle, laughing. “Your statements are a little vague. I should be a good deal troubled with such evidence, to gain your cause.”

“My cause?”

“Yes; I am supposing that you are going to law to recover your name, your rights, your inheritance.”

“Oh, make yourself easy about that, Monsieur Goefle,” replied Cristiano; “you will never have a cause to plead for me. I have none of the ordinary foolishness of adventurers of mysterious birth, who assume, at the very least, to be the sons of kings, and who spend their whole lives in hunting all over the world for their illustrious relatives, without remembering that they, most probably, would find it more inconvenient than agreeable to be recognized. For my part, if I happen to be of a noble family I don’t know it, and I don’t trouble myself about it. My adopted parents entertained this same indifference, or rather they inspired me with it.”

“And who were your adopted parents?”

“I have never known, and I have no recollection who the persons were who received me from the window into the boat, who kept me at nurse, and who carried me into Italy. They may all have been of the same family—perhaps it was one and the same person—I can’t tell anything at all about it. My only real adopted parents were Signor Goffredi, an antiquary and professor of ancient history at Perugia, and his excellent wife, Sophia Goffredi, whom I loved like a mother.”

“But where and from whom did these good people receive you? They must have told you—”

“They never knew. They had a small fortune, and having no children, they had several times shown a desire to adopt some poor orphan. One evening, in carnival time, a man in a mask presented himself to them, and took from under his cloak the individual who now has the honor to address you, but who has not the least recollection in the world of the occurrence, and could give no explanation of it at the time; inasmuch as he then spoke a language that nobody could understand.”

“But,” interrupted the advocate, who was listening to this story with the same attention that he would have bestowed upon the progress of a cause in court, “what was the tenor of the words used by the masked person who presented you to Professor Goffredi and his wife?”

“Here they are, as they were repeated to me: ‘I come from a distance—a great distance. I am poor, and have been obliged to spend part of the money given me with this child, in travelling. I thought myself bound to do this, for I had been ordered to carry him far away, very far, from his and my own country. Here is the rest of the money. I have heard that you were looking for a child to adopt, and I know you will bring him up happy and well-educated. Will you receive this poor orphan?’”

“The professor did receive it?”

“He accepted the child and refused the money. ‘If I want a child to bring up,’ he said, ‘it is my duty to provide for him; not his for me!’”

“And had he not curiosity enough to inform himself—?”

“He could obtain no information except on one point—whether or no the child was likely to be reclaimed. He wanted to feel that it was wholly his; for he did not wish to become attached to the little creature, and then some day or other have it taken away. The unknown swore to him that no one would ever reclaim me; ‘and,’ he added, ‘the proof is that I have brought him more than five hundred leagues, for the express purpose of causing every trace of him to be lost. The child,’ he continued, ‘would be in the utmost danger, even here, if his whereabouts should be discovered. Ask me no questions, therefore, I shall not answer them!’ And he insisted upon leaving with them the small sum in question, which amounted to two or three hundred sequins.”

“Italian money?”

“Foreign gold coins of various countries, as if the unknown had crossed the whole of Europe, and had taken pains to convert his money into all sorts of pieces, so as to disappoint search or supposition.”

“The Goffredis reminded him that he was poor; he had said so, and his whole appearance showed it. It was only just, they thought, that he should be rewarded for taking such a long journey, and fulfilling so faithfully his orders about my removal. These offers he refused with obstinacy, and austerely. He departed very abruptly, saying, to prevent further questions, that he would return next day. He did not return, however; nothing further was ever heard of him; and so I remained intrusted, or, more properly, abandoned, thank God, to the care of M. and Madame Goffredi.”

“But the history of the lake, the window and the boat—where the deuce did you get that?”

“Wait a moment. When I was five or six years old—I was apparently three or four when I made my entry into Perugia under the cloak of the man in the mask—I had a fall, and was for a time thought to be dead. It was not very serious, after all. But among the friends of my adopted family who came to inquire after me, there slipped in a little Jew, whether baptized or not I do not know, who lived in Perugia, and traded with visitors, in objects of art and antiquity. My parents disliked him because he was a Jew; for in Italy, as here, a strong prejudice prevails against that people. This Jew inquired about me anxiously, and even insisted on seeing me, so as to be satisfied as to my condition.

“A year afterwards, we spent the summer in the country, and on our return to the city, he came again to obtain further information about me, and to see with his own eyes whether I had grown, and was well. My parents were extremely surprised at this, and insisted on knowing why he took so much interest in me. They threatened to exclude him from the house unless he gave a satisfactory account of the matter; for they were already fond of me, and were afraid that this Jew might mean to carry me off. Upon this he confessed, or pretended, that he had chanced to receive at his house the man in the mask, on the day of his arrival in the city, and had extracted certain confidential disclosures from him about me. These disclosures, vague, improbable, and utterly useless, were the statements with which I began my story. Probably they are not entitled to any credit whatever. My adoptive mother paid very little attention to them, but thinking the adventure somewhat romantic, she gave me the surname of del Lago, which I have for a long time used as my real name.”

“But the baptismal name, Christian, Christin, Christiern, Chrétien, Cristiano, who gave you that?”

“The man in the mask, without adding any other.”

“Did this man speak Italian?”

“Very imperfectly. His difficulty in explaining himself added not a little to the mystery about me.”

“But what sort of accent had he?”

“Professor Goffredi had occupied himself with the dead languages only. His wife, like himself a highly educated person, knew a good deal about living languages, but she found it impossible to decide to what nationality this man’s accent belonged.”

“And the little Jew, what did he think?”

“If he had any opinion about it, he never thought proper to tell it.”

“Were your parents quite sure he was not himself the man in the mask?”

“Quite certain. The man in the mask was of middle size, while the Jew was not five feet high. Nor had their voices or accents anything of similarity. I see, Monsieur Goefle, that, like my poor friends the Goffredis, you are asking yourself all sorts of questions about me; but what difference would it make, let me ask you, even if you could answer them?”

“Very true; what difference would it make?” answered M. Goefle. “Perhaps you may not be worth the pains I have been taking this hour past to put you in the way of discovering your family. It is from a professional habit of mind: let us say no more about it; particularly as in all that you have told me there is not a single definite fact to serve as the basis for framing ingenious and learned deductions. Wait, however;—what was done with the money of the man in the mask?”

“My good parents, imagining that it may have been the hire of a kidnapper, or the reward of some other crime, and believing, therefore, that it could not bring me good fortune, hastened to deposit it in the box for the poor in the cathedral of Perugia.”

“But you mentioned that you yourself spoke some language when you were brought there.”

“Certainly; but I quickly forgot it, as there was no one for me to talk to in it. I only know that a German philologist, who was visiting us next year, tried to unravel the mystery, at which time I had a good deal of trouble to remember a few words of this old language of mine. The linguist said it was a northern dialect, and somewhat like Icelandic; but my black hair seemed in a measure to invalidate that conclusion. The attempt to discover the facts was given up. My adoptive mother wished to make me forget all about any other country or family. You may easily suppose she had little difficulty in accomplishing her object.”

“One question more,” said M. Goefle. “I cannot feel thoroughly interested in a story until I am well possessed of the beginning of it. These recollections, that faded of themselves so naturally, and which your friends tried, moreover, to help you lose—does there remain absolutely nothing of them?”

“There is something, but so vague that I cannot tell whether it is not merely a dream. It is a recollection of a strange, wild country, even grander in its features than this around me.”

“A cold country?”

“That I do not know. Children seldom feel the cold, and I was never very sensitive to it.”

“What else was there in your dream? Sunshine? snow?”

“I don’t know. Tall trees, herds of cows, I think.”

“Tall trees—that is not Iceland. And what do you remember of the journey to Italy?”

“Absolutely nothing. I believe my companion, or companions, were strangers to me when we set out.”

“Well, go on with your story.”

“That is, I will begin it, Monsieur Goefle; for, so far, I have only been telling you the mysterious circumstances with which, as the poets say, my cradle was surrounded. I will begin with the first clearly-defined recollection in my mind. This is—pray do not be scandalized—an ass.”

“An ass? A quadruped or a biped?”

“A real ass with four legs; a flesh-and-blood ass. He was the favorite animal of Sophia Goffredi for riding, and was called Nino, the diminutive of Giovanni. I was so fond of him, that I have called the one I now use to carry my baggage by the name of Jean, in remembrance of him who was the joy of my early childhood.”

“Ah, you have an ass? It must have been he who visited me last evening.”

“And it was you who had him put in the stable?”

“Exactly. You seem to love asses.”

“Fraternally. Indeed, I have been thinking for a quarter of an hour that mine has, perhaps, not had his breakfast. Ulph will be afraid of him. Perhaps he has driven him out of the chateau. The poor fellow may be wandering about in the ice and snow at this very moment, awakening the insensible echoes with his plaintive voice. I beg pardon, Monsieur Goefle, but I must leave you for a moment and look after my ass.”

“You are a queer fellow,” said M. Goefle. “Well, be quick, and give an eye to my horse at the same time. He’s worth more than your ass—no offence to you. But are you going out to the stable in my dress-coat and silk stockings?”

“I shall be back in a moment.”

“No, no, my boy, that won’t do at all. Besides, you will catch cold. Take my furred boots and pelisse, and be quick!”

Cristiano thankfully obeyed, and found Jean in very good case, coughing less than on the day before, and eating contentedly in company with Loki, whom Ulph had brought back from the new chateau.

Ulph was looking at the ass in stupid wonderment. He was beginning to recover a little from his drunkenness, and to suspect that it was not a horse that he had so quietly groomed in the morning. Cristiano, who had learned on the previous evening, while hunting after his supper, what a superstitious poltroon he had to deal with, addressed him at once in Italian, accompanying his remarks with fierce looks and absurd and terrifying gestures. In this fantastic style, he ordered the poor fellow to respect the ass like a mythological divinity, and threatened him with the most fearful punishment in case of disobedience. Ulph, in a great fright, retired in silence, after saluting both the ass and his master, his brain full of indistinct notions that he could not carry forward to any intelligible conclusion, but which the spirituous indulgences of the coming evening would be sure to develop into new alarms and imaginations more and more strange.

“Very well,” continued Cristiano, returning and resuming his pipe, his story, and his position astride of a chair, in the bear-room; “Madame Goffredi’s ass was my first friend. I believe no donkey in the world, not even my own, ever had such beautiful ears and such an agreeable gait. Perhaps, Monsieur Goefle, the reason I think so is, that the first time that quiet pace and those two long ears attracted the attention of my poor little undeveloped mind, I was at the same moment instinctively impressed by one of the most beautiful sights in the universe. It was on the shore of a lake. Lakes, you see, play an important part in my life. But what a lake this was! The lake of Perugia—the ancient lake Thrasymene! Were you never in Italy, Monsieur Goefle?”

“No, very much to my regret. But as to lakes, we have some here in Sweden that would make your Italian ones look like wash-basins.”

“I have nothing to say against your lakes. I have already seen a number of them. Very likely they are beautiful in summer, and even in winter, with their mjelgars—is not that the name of those immense avalanches of earth that slide down to the water’s edge with their green trees standing, their rocks and strange fractures?—I admit that they are very remarkable. The hoar-frost and ice that cover so many strange forms, and make a wreath of diamonds out of the smallest blade of grass; these inextricable net-works of brambles that might be taken for immense and elaborate pieces of work in cut-glass; the glorious red sunlight over it all; the jagged peaks above, glittering like shafts of sapphire against the purple of the morning—yes, I confess the grandeur of all this scenery. Even what I can see out of this window is a picture which dazzles me. Dazzles: that is the word; and that is really the only criticism I have to offer upon it. It excites me—carries me beyond myself. Enthusiasm is good, no doubt; but is there nothing else in life? Has not man an immense need for repose, for contemplation, without any sense of effort; for that sort of soft, delicious revery that we call far niente? Well, it is down in the south, at such a place as lake Thrasymene, that one feels a glorious consciousness of mere vegetating. It was there that I grew up in perfect quiet, without any violent changes; a poor little weed, transplanted, from some unknown region, to those shores, blessed by the sunshine, shaded by the ancient faint-hued olive-trees, and, as it were, bathed always in warm fluid gold.

“We had—it is a sad we—a little country-house, or villetta, on a small stream called the Sanguineto, or Bloody Brook; in memory, it is said, of the blood that once ran down its bed from the field of the famous battle of Thrasymene. Here we passed all the pleasant summer weather in a delicious rural paradise. There were no more corpses in the stream; the waters of the Sanguineto were as clear as crystal. However, my dear adoptive father used to be absorbed by his quaint occupation of searching for bones, medals, and remains of armor, of which great quantities are still found among the grass and flowers along the shore of the lake. His wife, who adored him—and with good reason—always accompanied him; and I, by this time a great careless boy, whom also, in their loving kindness, they adored—I used to roll about on the warm sand, or ride dreaming along on my dear mother’s lap, rocked by Nino’s even pace.

“Gradually I came to perceive and understand the splendor of the days and nights in that lovely country. The lake is immense. Not that it covers so much space as even the smallest of yours, but grandeur is not the same as dimension. The curves of its outlines are so grand, and its atmosphere is so soft, that its luminous distances give an impression of infinity. I cannot remember, without emotion, certain sunrises and sunsets that I have seen there, over that broad mirror, filled with reflections of headlands crowded with tall, thick trees, and of distant islets, showing as white as alabaster among the rosy waves. And at night, what myriads of stars hung quivering in the tranquil water! How lovely were the mists that climbed the silvery slopes, and how mysterious the harmonies that seemed to creep unobtrusively along the shores, with the slight ebb and flow of that great mass of waters that seemed afraid of disturbing the sleep of the flowers! With you, you must confess, Monsieur Goefle, that nature is violent, even in its winter’s repose. In your mountains everything carries the marks of the perpetual floods of your spring and autumn. But there, all the terrestrial outlines are certain of preservation for a long time, and every plant of maturing in the place where it was born. In breathing such an air, we breathe in with it some similar kindliness of instinct; the eternal happiness of nature diffuses itself in the soul without overpowering or confounding it.”

“You have a poetical vein in you, evidently,” said M. Goefle; “but are not the people of that beautiful country dirty, idle, and voluntarily wretched?”

“Poverty is always half the fault of the government and half of the governed; the blame is never all on one side. I suppose that may be what prevents improvement. But in such a pleasant climate, the poverty produced by indolence finds an excuse in the sensuous pleasure of contemplative existence. In my youth I felt keenly this intoxicating charm of the south, and I appreciated it all the more because I felt also, from time to time, an excess of feverish energy, as if I had really been born five hundred leagues away, in those cold regions where mind exerts more authority over matter.”

“Then you were not altogether indolent yourself?”

“I believe I was not indolent at all, for my parents desired me to become a learned man, and, out of affection for them, I made great efforts to acquire knowledge. But I felt much more inclined towards the natural sciences, arts, and philosophy, than to the difficult and minute researches of the learned M. Goffredi. I thought his line of study rather useless, and was quite unable to experience such a delirium of joy as he felt when we had succeeded in determining the purpose of some ancient landmark or deciphering some Etruscan inscription. In other matters he left me perfectly free to follow my own preferences, and I lived with him in the pleasantest relations that it is possible to imagine. Indulge me in a few details about this period of my life, from infancy to youth—the time when the faculties of my soul were awakening within me.

“Perugia is a university city, a poetical place—one of the old Italian centres of beauty and learning. It is rich in antiquities and monuments of all periods; it has some fine libraries, an academy of fine arts, collections, and so forth. The city itself is beautiful and picturesque; it includes more than a hundred churches and fifty monasteries, all rich in pictures, manuscripts, etc. The Piazza del Duomo is a remarkable place, having on one side a rich Gothic cathedral, a fountain by Giovanni de Pisa, a chef-d’œuvre, and other monuments of different ages, and on the other a great palace in the Venetian style. This is a proud and strange relic of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, of a sombre red, finished with black ornaments in iron, and with its doors and windows pierced with that fantastic irregularity of design which has gone so entirely out of vogue since the introduction of the correct lines and pure taste introduced by the renaissance.

“I felt a passionate admiration for what I may call the dramatic physiognomy of this old palace, though M. Goffredi despised it as belonging to a period of barbarism. He admired only the antique, and such modern periods as are inspired by the antique. For my part, I plainly confess that all these masterpieces of exactly the same school, ancient and modern, sometimes tried very severely my power of admiring. This predetermined preference of the Italians for always going over that same old ground again, and their obstinate neglect of exactly the period when the national character was most freely expressing itself, between the absolutism of the emperors and that of the popes, had become so consecrated by public opinion, that you will pass there for a Vandal if you allow yourself to use any other than the recognized standards of excellence.[5]

“I was natural and spontaneous in my character, and accordingly I was often reproved in consequence of my love for what was indiscriminately called ‘The Gothic’—that is, everything not pertaining to the ages of Pericles, Augustus, or Raphael. It was with some effort, indeed, that my adoptive father could bring himself to admire the last of these three. His only enthusiasm was for the ruins of Rome; and when he took me thither he was surprised and scandalized to hear me say that I saw nothing there to make me forget the royal imaginativeness and effective grouping of our own Piazza del Duomo, with its great red and black palace, its assemblage of varied splendors, and its narrow, crooked streets, that suddenly plunge under gloomy arcades, with a sort of air of tragic mystery.

“I was by this time fifteen or sixteen years old, and began to be able to explain my tastes and ideas. I managed to make my father understand that it was a matter of necessity for me to be absolutely independent in all that related to taste and feeling. I could not help admiring and enjoying all efforts of genius and of invention. I found it impossible to imprison my views within a system, an epoch, or a school. In a word, I must have liberty to adore the universe, God, and that divine spark which He has given to man, wherever visible in the works of nature or of art.

“‘Thus,’ I said to him, ‘I love the beautiful sunshine and the gloomy night; our own austere Perugino and the impetuous Michael Angelo; the mighty substructures of the Romans, and the delicate pierced work of the Saracens. I love our own quiet lake Thrasymene, and the furious cataract of Terni. I love your beloved Etruscans and all your sublime ancients, but I also love the Greco-arabic cathedrals; I love equally the monumental fountain of Trevi, and the little brook that runs between two rocks in the depths of some rural solitude. Everything that is new seems to me worthy of interest and of attention; everything is dear to me that at any time seizes hold of my heart or of my thoughts. Feeling these impulses to admire whatever is beautiful or sublime, and even whatever is merely charming or agreeable, I have a great repugnance for a devotion confined to certain forms of the beautiful exclusively.

“‘But,’ I continued, ‘if you are convinced that in this I am in a wrong road, that the impulse which I feel—the desire for development in all directions—is dangerous, a symptom of an ill-regulated mental action, I will do my best to repress it, and throw myself entirely into whatever course of study you may mark out for me. I desire, above all things, to be what you wish me to be; but, my dear father, before you cut my wings, please to make yourself certain that there is nothing worth preserving in all this vain plumage.’