The sky was covered with clouds and fogs, through which the full moon shone like a ball of red fire, far down near the horizon. In the east sheet lightning flashed to and fro. The air was hot and oppressive. In the garden below the windows the flowering fruit-trees shone with a white sheen, while the oaks and beeches, which rose like giants along the wall around the garden, up to the heavens, lay buried in deep, dark shadow. Nightingales sang in long, full notes; a fountain played merrily, but in subdued tones, as if dreaming. Oswald felt strangely excited. His past arose before his mind's eye in dim images, scene after scene, as the veil of clouds drove over the face of the moon; visions of the future flashed across them, as the lightning toward the east. Suddenly the trees rustled, and the loud bell, which he had heard at his arrival, struck twelve in slow, measured beats. He started. "Did you not mean to give up dreaming?" he asked himself, smiling. "Well then, you had better go to bed if you cannot stay awake without dreaming." CHAPTER II. Oswald had been a week at Castle Grenwitz, and the week had seemed to him but a day. It was his nature to take up every new thing with a passion, even though the new thing was ordinary enough in itself, and here it was far from being so. He had a new situation, new surroundings, new acquaintances. All this caused him, with his sanguine temper, for a time a most delightful sensation; he found it easy to discover charms, and at least something interesting, in all with whom he came into contact; in the baroness, with her cold, severe features; even in the reticent coachman, against whom he had been so strongly prejudiced on the very first evening; even in the humble familiar servant, with his everlasting: "What are your orders, sir?" The letters which he wrote at this time to his friends all bore the impress of this happy, conciliatory disposition. "Here I am," he said in one of them, "here I am in this new station of my strange life, and upon my word I think I shall stay here, in spite of the impatience for which you blame me so often, until Father Chronos has changed the horses in his stage, and blows his horn once more. If I were not afraid of calling down upon me your bitter irony by my enthusiasm, I might go so far as to thank the kind star that has led me here. I am just in the temper to do so. I have breathed in these days so freely in this air of salt water and forests, that my poor head, filled with the dust of miserable old folios, is quite unsettled. Certainly, if the people here are not altogether unfit for this paradise, I have the finest future for some years to come.