“How we passed the town of Blankenburg I quite forgot, and indeed I thought of little save that I was returning to the castle of my father’s fathers. I knew that Adolf and his company were taking mental account of their new lord; of his Milanese hosiery, his Florentine mantle, his Venice corselet, and his Bologna bonnet. More quizzical, too, I knew they were of my smooth chin and smooth white hands, so unlike their mighty spades: but I was resolved to teach them in due time they had a true lord to rule over them, and kept my peace, and thus we fared toward the castle. “There it rose on its green crest above the foothills, with its gaunt battlements and towers; and I meditated, as I neared it, on all the iron-handed, flinty-hearted ritters, my forbears, who had ridden forth under its gates to fight their feuds, lift their neighbors’ cattle, and strip the Magdeburg caravans, even as had the rascal I had lately captured. Hardly two generations since, and to be Graf von Regenstein had been to fear the Devil only a little and God not at all, and to be the wildest lance in all Saxony. Yet here was I,--lineal heir of those men,--returning to my ancestral home, with its dungeons, portcullis, sally-ports, its cavernous halls adorned with wolf-heads, bearskins, and dingy armor! But, lo! my head was filled with the tinkling of languishing Tuscan sonnets, and as we trudged up the hill I fell to musing how one might describe the peaceful landscape in the Doric of Theocritus,--true language surely for such an idyll! A cursing in fiercest dialect, from Adolf, as his horse stumbled, recalled me in a trice from ancient Sicily to present Harzland. I glanced upward. We were almost beneath the fortress.