"I love to have time to consider all things," answered the Count of Ehrenstein. "To-morrow will be time enough for my determination to appear: and now, my lord, farewell. I trust your daughter may prove as obedient as mine, and may find friends, as wise and powerful as yourself, to aid and encourage her in the course she chooses." Thus saying, with a bitter smile, and every angry passion in his heart, the Count of Ehrenstein turned his horse and rode away, his retainers following, and old Seckendorf keeping a wary eye to the rear, lest any attack should be made upon their retreating party, either by the force of Count Rudolph, or the armed peasantry who had gathered on the hill. CHAPTER XL. It is a common maxim that time destroys falsehood, and leaves truth intact. This may be true in the abstract; for truth, in its nature is indestructible; but as the mind of man is always more or less in a misty state, and his perception of no object very clear and distinct; even that which is true in the abstract he often renders false in application by various errors of his own, and by none more frequently than by using that in a figurative sense which is only just in a definite sense. No maxim has thus been more perverted than the one I have cited, that time destroys falsehood, but leaves truth intact. It has been used figuratively; it has had its signification extended; it has had its very terms altered; and we find it at last changed so as to assert that time destroys falsehood, but brings truth to light. In this form, however, it is altogether inadmissible. Time may destroy falsehood, as anything else that is perishable. It may sometimes bring truth to light; but it does neither always; and this is one of the vulgar maxims of the world, of which we have so many, intended to support morality, but, in fact, destroying it; for the key-stone of morals is truth. Society manufactures facts just as it builds houses and churches, forms rings, or swords, or bracelets. The real deeds, and thoughts, and feelings of men, and the false assertions concerning them--all, in short, that forms the great mass of history,--are cast down, broken, mutilated, and covered over with the mud and ashes of passing generations, as age follows age; but the truth lies buried as well as the falsehood; and the waves of time that overlay them with the refuse, and lumber, and dirt of a hundred centuries, from hour to hour, roll up the fragments to the feet of those who stand upon the dry strand of the present; or else man's busy and inquisitive hand digs them up; and--as we search amongst the ruins of a past city, for the gems and jewels, the sculpture and the painting of races now no more, casting from us what is worthless--so seek we amongst the records of the former times (if we are wise), preserving what is true and precious, and throwing away what is false. Yet how much useless lumber and unsubstantial trash is retained and valued in both cases.