The first sentiment that Ernestine had awakened within me returned with renewed force; the sound of her voice--one glimpse of that well-remembered form--had recalled it all, as it were, from the depth of my heart, and I felt that I loved her as she deserved to be loved. But the count, her father!--the thought of him gave me an unpleasant twinge. What would he, a Catholic, an Imperialist, a noble and high military officer under that ambitious Emperor who had bestowed upon him so many princely gifts, think of me loving his daughter; for I was but a poor soldier of fortune--a captain of musketeers, under the unfortunate King of Denmark. My heart sank at the comparison; but I reflected that the count was brave, generous, and not indisposed to love me: that he, too, had probably left our Scottish hills, a poor cavalier with no other inheritance than his sword: and that my birth and blood were perhaps as good as his own. My heart rose again at these thoughts, and now I looked towards the shore. The wind had changed. We were lying a westward course, and had run about fifteen Danish miles; the lights of the burning town had disappeared upon our larboard quarter, and we were now off the mouth of the bay of Kiel; the glassy sea and the level shores within it, lay sleeping in the moonlight, in the cold white lustre of which our sails shone like new-fallen snow. Here and there, to mark a promontory or a shoal, a great beacon of coals or other fuel was blazing on the summit of a cairn or an ancient tower, and shedding a long and tremulous line of light upon the heaving water. As we passed the mouth of the Kielerfiord, we saw afar off the capital of Holstein, with its spires; for the pure blue of the northern sky made all beneath it, distinct to us, as at noonday, and what a change of scene was that quiet shore, with its gentle slopes, its thatched farm-houses and green islets, its clumps of waving trees and glassy water, all steeped in the silver splendour of a full autumnal moon, when compared to the carnage and the horrors I had witnessed a few hours before! The pride of my profession sank in my breast, and a disgust at war almost arose within me. For a moment I wondered not at the old Danish story of Adolphus IV., the conquering Count of Holstein, who, in the thirteenth century, exchanged in old age his armour for the cassock of a mendicant friar, and, surrendering all he possessed to God and the poor, begged his bread from door to door through the streets of yonder town, his capital of Kiel; and I sorrowfully reflected that in another day the victorious legions of Tilly would spread over these fair districts like a desolating flood.