“No smug, smooth-stuccoed palazzo was Schloss Regenstein, fashioned after Messere Bramante’s clever ideas filched from Vitruvius. Hard and harsh reared the castle, one great jagged mass of walls, battlements, gable roof and uncouth peak-capped donjons,--an inchoate thing, like the savage icebergs which sailors say course the northern seas. At first it seemed a single shapeless creation, wrought out of unhewn rock by the primeval giants and kobolds. Then as my awe of it began a little to wane, the thing took on a certain order. I could distinguish the steep winding way of hard round cobbles, the narrow drawbridge over the dizzy moat, the portcullis hanging its spikes like the welcoming upper fangs of a hungry monster. Behind that were walls--gray and sheer save for ominous loopholes. Within these walls, others still higher and more precipitous. Above these were standing what appeared to be portions of a vast rambling house with numerous arch-topped windows; again above this house--Ossa piled on Pelion--were three round towers of prodigious size, and from the tallest whipped a banner--my own green standard with the three white boars’ heads. Upon the tower to the left dangled something black that was swinging slowly--a skeleton hung in chains. “I was just meditating whether I should take this fell sight as an omen, when suddenly our approach seemed to have been observed in the castle above. Instantly all the windows above the battlement were crowded with faces, and right before me I saw no grim-visaged cross-bowmen, but flaxen curls and rosy faces,--a score of eager children, shouting their ‘_Gruss!_’ to their strange lord and master. And then--boom! boom! boom! three clouds of culverin smoke blew across the gate. I entered the castle,--not the Conte di Palaestro, but the Graf von Regenstein returning to his own. “I passed my hand across my forehead, saying inwardly ‘At last I am in the North.’” * * * * *