These pleasant, and yet also painful recollections passed through Oswald's mind as he roved about in his leisure hours, wandering alone, or with his pupils, through the garden, the fields, and the forest, and daily growing fonder of life in the country. Often he would run down into the great garden early in the morning before the lessons commenced, and look into the dew-filled flowers and listen to the song of the birds, and then it appeared to him marvellous how anybody, how he himself, had ever been able to live in a city. It is true that Castle Grenwitz and its surroundings were such as to excite the admiration of eyes more familiar even than his with landscape beauties, although the crowds of tourists who every summer visited the island rarely penetrated so far. If some accidentally discovered it, they wondered why so charming a place, with so many points of interest about it, could have been forgotten in the hand-books for travellers, merely because it lay a few miles from the great high-road. The château bears, to this day, traces of the wealth and the power of the old knightly race of the Barons of Grenwitz, who have been landowners here from time immemorial, and who built the castle for their own defence, and in defiance of the neighboring barons, towards the middle of the fourteenth century. The lower story of one of the wings, with its colossal blocks of stone, dates from that early period; so does also the big round tower, at the point where the old and the new castle now meet. The new part was built in the seventeenth century, in the prevailing style of that day, and looks, with its ornamented pillars and queer decorations by the side of the plain, massive tower, like a man of fashion of the time of Louis XIV. by the side of a knight in armor of the days of Crécy and Poitiers.