I was happy in having with me an admirable Austrian servant who had been in the country before, and knew more or less of its ways. I found his resources inexhaustible, except on one occasion. I stayed on the way at Vicenza, for the purpose of seeing some of its Palladian palaces, and I asked him, when I reached the hotel, to find some guide or waiter who spoke either French or English. He could find no one who knew a syllable of one tongue or the other. Next morning, however, he had secured an Italian native who spoke and understood German. Here was all I wanted. I spoke English to my servant, he spoke German to the Italian, the Italian spoke to the people of whom I wanted to make inquiries. This arrangement, I found, was productive of great advantages. Having made notes of the palaces I wished to see, I told my Italian in each case to inquire whether an English gentleman, much interested in architecture, might be privileged to visit the interior, of the beauty of which he had heard much. The fact that I was making my rounds with a retinue of two attendants was accepted as such a guaranty of my own good character and importance that I was admitted with the utmost courtesy to stately and interesting interiors, from the portals of which I should otherwise have been driven with suspicion and ignominy. Having seen what I could at Vicenza, I spent a night at Treviso, whence, having got up before sunrise, I drove in a weeping morning to the wonderful Villa Maser, about twenty miles away--the villa whose halls and chambers are gorgeous from end to end with the frescoes of Paul Veronese, and whose tutelary gods look out over the vastness of the Lombard plains, though their view is slightly impeded by the bulk of a Renaissance church. That evening I ensconced myself in an ill-lit train, which, passing close to Venice and crossing the Austrian frontier, brought me and my servant to a strange little medieval town, where we slept in an arcaded hostelry which would not have seemed strange to Erasmus. I halted here because in the neighboring wonderland is, as I knew from descriptions, a castle more fantastic than any fancy of Albert Duerer's--the high-perched castle of Hoch-Osterwitz. I spent next day in exploring it. It outdid all my dreams. Reached by a corkscrew road which, passing through strange gatehouses, winds upward round an isolated hill resembling a pine-clad sugar loaf, the castle covers the summit. It suggested Tennyson's line to me: "Pricked with incredible pinnacles into heaven." Not so large or terrific as St. Hilarion, it inflicts perhaps on the imagination a yet acuter twinge, for St. Hilarion belongs to an age so wholly dissociated from our own that the distance between them is beyond the reach of measurement. Hoch-Osterwitz, on the other hand, though in consequence of its inconvenient position its owners no longer lived in it, was still not wholly derelict. Its roofs were watertight; a portion of it was occupied