I might have known that we were going there. The place is celebrated through the entire province. For what it was celebrated I only vaguely knew. Grandfather had never taken me there; he detested places that every one visited, “where,” he used to say, “whole families go on Sundays, places full of memories, great men, battles and greasy papers.” Father grew animated when he talked of battles. Had not he too defended the house against our enemies, against Aunt Deen’s they, so fiercely bent upon its overthrow? Won to him for a moment, I had almost asked, “And where were you during the war, father?” I knew that he had entered the army and braved the snow with his company during a bitter winter. But the question did not pass my lips. To have asked it would have been to own that I was yielding to his influence, and I braced myself to resist him. I would have given all this forest of oaks, birches and beeches, all those ruins, so picturesque against the sky-line, for the chestnut tree under which Nazzarena had passed. He led me to the edge of the terrace that had once been the court of the château, the wall of which had been thrown down. From here one dominated the whole country; there was the lake with its indented shores, its graceful little gulfs, its green promontories, the town rising in terraces above it, easy to trace by its open squares and public gardens; there were the villages of the plain, half hidden in greenery, like flocks of sheep at rest, those on the hillsides grouped around their sentry-like churches; and closing in the view, the mountains, here clothed with forests, there rocky and bare. The pure afternoon light, shimmering over all, sharpened their outlines. Here and there a slate roof reflected back its arrows of gold. The various crops could be distinguished by their different colours, by the various shades of green, and all the boundaries of the indefinitely divided properties, hedges, walls or fences, and the little white cemeteries with their square plots, near the groups of houses, stood out clear.