"Wait and watch," said Oswald, to himself. "In the mean time I will rest a little, for I begin to feel rather tired." He hung his straw hat upon a branch, spread his handkerchief over a moss-covered root of a secular beech-tree, and stretched himself comfortably on the soft heather. "This place is made to sleep in," he said to himself, dreamily following with his eye the dragon-flies, who now shot like arrows across the dark waters and now stood as if spell-bound. "Who knows but this may be an enchanted wood, a fragment of forgotten romance, a little remnant of the grand old forests of which we read in legends and fairy tales; a portion perhaps of that forest in which the count lived, who, every time when his notes became due and he could not pay them, sold one of his daughters--a way of paying old debts which they say has not yet gone entirely out of fashion. And he who falls asleep in this forest, as I fancy I shall presently do myself, has to sleep on for a few hundred years, and when he wakes up once more his beard is snow-white and hanging down to the belt. Then he is justly astonished at himself, and asks the first peasant he meets with where the way to Berkow is!"--"Berkow," replies the man, politely; "never heard of such a place."--"I mean the château in the forest, where Melitta lives."--"Melitta? But, my dear sir, that's an old fairy tale."--"A fairy tale?"--"Why certainly! My old grandmamma has told it me I know not how often." Many, many hundred years ago there was a great forest standing in this country; and in the forest lived a fairy, and her name was Melitta. She had the most beautiful dark-brown eyes, such as the children of men are never known to have, and a voice sweet as honey, and that is why the people called her Melitta. She was the most beautiful and sweetest of fairies in the world; but she had one little weakness; from time to time she would allure a young man into this forest and make him lose his way amid the tall oaks and beeches, each one of which was exactly like the next one. Then she rejoiced. And when she wanted to set a poor fellow wandering in this way, she mounted her horse Bella--for this fairy had nothing but what was beautiful around her--and travelled far and wide, till she found a stupid man. For she liked stupid men the best. Then she charmed him with her beauty, with her soft, teasing, bewitching ways and her honey-sweet voice; and in order to make the enchantment lasting, she gave him something--perhaps a rose. If he was stupid enough to accept that, he had to wander the very next day into the forest, whether he would or not. Then, of course, he lost his way, and ran to and fro and round about, till at last he would lie down to sleep at the foot of an old beech-tree. And when he is lying there watching the dragon-flies as they try to catch each other, and looking at the water, and listening to the whispers in the rushes, and the low murmurs in the branches above, he hears low