When, as it seemed to me, it must be nearing dawn, though how the hours flitted so swiftly passed my comprehension, I very cautiously climbed out of my narrow window and descended slowly to the lawns beneath.  My foot had scarcely touched ground when ringing and menacing from some dark gallery of the palace above me broke out a distant baying.

Nothing shall persuade me to tell how fast I ran; how feverishly I haled poor Rosinante out of sleep, and pushed her down into the deeps of that coal-black stream; with what agility I clambered into the saddle.

Yet I could not help commiserating the while the faithful soul who floated beneath me.  The stream was swift but noiseless, the water rather rare than cold, yet, despite all the philosophy beaming out of her maidenly eyes across the smooth surface of the tide, Rosinante must have preferred from the bottom of her heart dry land.

I, too, momentarily, when I discovered that we were speedily approaching the roaring fall whose reverberations I had heard long since.

Out of the emerald twilight we floated from beneath the overarching thickets.  Pale beams were striking from the risen sun upon the gliding surface, and dwelt in splendour where danger sat charioted beneath a palely gorgeous bow.  Yet I doubt if ever mortal man swept on to defeat at last so rapturously as I.

The gloomier trees had now withdrawn from the banks of the river.  A pale morning sky over-canopied the shimmering forests.  Here rose the solitary tower where Echo tarried for the Hornblower.  And straight before us, across that level floor, beyond a tremulous cloud of foam and light and colour, lurked the unseen, the unimaginable, the ever-dreamed-of, Death.

Heedless of Lorelei, heedless of all save the beauty and terror and glory in which they rode, down swept snorting ship and master to doom.

The crystal water jargoned past my saddle.  Sky, earth, and tower, like the panorama of a dream, wheeled around me.  Light blinded me; clamour deafened me; foam and the pure wave and cold darkness whelmed over me.  We surged, paused, gazed, nodded, crashed:—­and so an end to Ennui.

VII

    He loves to talk with marineres
    That come from a far countree.

    —­SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

How long my body was the sport of that foaming water I cannot tell.  But when I again opened my eyes, I found, first, that the sun was shining dazzling clear high above me, and, next, that the delightful noise of running water babbled close against my ear.  I lay upon a strip of warm sward by the river’s brink.  Near by me grew some rank-smelling waterside plant, and overhead the air seemed peopled with larks.

I crawled, confused and aching, to the water, and dipped my head and hands into the cold rills.  This soon refreshed me, for the sun had, it would seem, long been dwelling on that passive corse of mine by the waterside and had parched it to the skin.