Thus they had reached a meadow lying in the very heart of the forest. As they followed the edge of the wood they suddenly saw a light glimmering on the opposite side. It came from the flame of a pile of briars which had just been kindled. Within the bright circle of the flames two persons were visible--a woman, as it seemed, and a child. Oswald's sharp eyes confirmed him in a suspicion which had entered his heart at the first glance. They were Xenobia and Czika. He hastened as fast as he could across the meadow towards the fire, but he had hardly accomplished half the distance when he sank up to his ankles into the morass. He saw that he could not go any further. He cried as loud as he could: "Xenobia! Czika! it is I! Oswald!" But his call had scarcely broken the peace of the silent forest when the fire vanished, and with the fire the two forms he had seen. All was quiet--quiet as death. Oswald might have imagined that his fancy had played him a trick. "What was the matter?" asked Berger, when Oswald joined him again. "Did you not see the fire!" "It was a will-o'-the-wisp in the swamp," replied Berger. "Let us go on." CHAPTER VIII. It was completely dark when the two wanderers left the last spur of the mountain, and reached the first houses of the village. Oswald, who was for the first time in this region, and whose sense of locality was not strongly developed, had of course allowed himself to be entirely guided by Berger, and had expected that the latter would return by the nearest road to Doctor Birkenhain's asylum. He was, therefore, not a little surprised when he found out that they were approaching the town from the opposite direction. There were the huge wagons laden with bales, there was the wide court-yard with its hospitably open gates, there was the green lamp burning in dismal dimness over the door of the house, and casting a mournful light upon one-half of the leaden hat which had once shone in all the splendor of oil-paint, but which had since passed through many a storm, losing its youthful freshness under the action of wind and weather and rain. There they heard in the low room to the right of the hall, with its four tiny windows and its dim light, the clinking of glasses, as thirsty guests knocked them impatiently against each other, and the concentrated noise of some twenty male voices, which were by no means delicate, and yet insisted upon being all heard at once. It would scarcely have needed all these unmistakable signs to convince Oswald that he was near the hospitable roof of the Green Hat. The sudden meeting with the gypsies in the forest had reminded him most forcibly of this whole affair, which Berger's recital had nearly driven from his mind.