A servant in the strange _mélange_ of a livery, where the colours seemed chosen from a bed of ranunculuses just near, came out to let down the steps and usher me into the house. He informed me that the count had given orders for my reception, but that he and all his friends were out on horseback, and would not be back before dinner-time. Not sorry to have a little time to myself, I retired to my room, and threw myself down on a most comfortable sofa, excessively well satisfied with the locality and well disposed to take advantage of my good fortune. The little bed, with its snow-white curtains and gilded canopy; the brass dogs upon the hearth, that shone like gold; the cherry-wood table, that might have served as a mirror; the modest book-shelf, with its pleasant row of volumes; but, better than all, the open window, from which I could see for miles over the top of a dark forest, and watch the Meuse as it came and went, now shining, now lost in the recesses of the wood-- all charmed me; and I fully confessed what I have had very frequently to repeat in life, that ‘Arthur O’Leary was born under a lucky planet.’ CHAPTER XII. CHATEAU LIFE Stretched upon a large old-fashioned sofa, where a burgomaster might have reclined with ‘ample room and verge enough,’ in all the easy abandonment of dressing-gown and slippers; the cool breeze gently wafting the window-blind to and fro, and tempering the lulling sounds from wood and water; the buzzing of the summer insects and the far-off carol of a peasant’s song--I fell into one of those delicious sleeps in which dreams are so faintly marked as to leave us no disappointment on waking: flitting shadowlike before the mind, they live only in a pleasant memory of something vague and undefined, and impart no touch of sorrow for expectations unfulfilled, for hopes that are not to be realised. I would that my dreams might always take this shape. It is a sad thing when they become tangible; when features and looks, eyes, hands, words, and signs, live too strongly in our sleeping minds, and we awake to the cold reality of our daily cares and crosses, tenfold less endurable from very contrast. No! give me rather the faint and waving outline, the shadowy perception of pleasure, than the vivid picture, to end only in the conviction that I am but Christopher Sly after all; or what comes pretty much to the same, nothing but--Arthur O’Leary.