It was clear to me that an invitation had been sent after me; and this thought filled the measure of my self-gratulation, and I drew nigh my fire, to sit and weave the pleasant-est fancies that had crossed my mind for many a long day. I waited for some time, sitting by the firelight, and then relit my lamp. I had a long letter to write to Mademoiselle Sara; for up to then I had said nothing of my arrival, nor given any account of the Schloss Hunyadi. Had my task been simply to record my life and my impressions of those around me at Hunyadi, nothing could well have been much easier. My few days there had been actually crammed with those small and pleasant incidents which tell well in gossiping correspondence. It was all, too, so strange, so novel, so picturesque, that, to make an effective tableau of such a life, was merely to draw on memory. There was a barbaric grandeur, on the whole, in the vast building; its crowds of followers, its hordes of retainers who came and went, apparently at no bidding but their own; in the ceaseless tide of travellers who, hospited for the night, went their way on the morrow, no more impressed by the hospitality, to all seeming, than by a thing they had their own valid right to. Details there were of neglect and savagery, that even an humble household might have been ashamed of, but these were lost--submerged, as it were--in that ocean of boundless extravagance and cost, and speedily lost sight of. It was now my task to tell Sara all this, colored by the light--a warm light, too--of my own enjoyment of it. I pictured the place as I saw it on the night I came, and told how I could not imagine for a while in what wild' region I found myself; I narrated the way in which I was assigned my place in this strange world, with Ober-jagers and Unter-jagers for my friends, who mounted me and often accompanied me in my rides; how I had seen the vast territories from hill-tops and eminences which pertained to the great Count, boundless plains that in summer would have been waving with yellow corn, and far-stretching woods of oak or pine lost in the long distance; and, last of all, coming down to the very moment I was writing, I related the incident by which I had been promoted to the society of the castle, and how I had passed my first evening. My pen ran rapidly along as I told of the splendors and magnificence of the scene, and of a company whose brilliant costume filled up the measure of the enchantment. “They pass and repass before me, in all their gorgeous bravery, as I write; the air vibrates with the music, and unconsciously my foot keeps time with the measure of that _csardas_, that spins and whirls before me till my brain reels with a mad intoxication.”