Was ever a man of delicacy and feeling so ruthlessly treated as I?  To be tempted by circumstances into pouring out one’s most intimate confessions to an icy person to whom one owes money, and then to have even this imperfect confidence interrupted by a tavern-waiter in an apron!  Miserable hireling! give us solitude and meditation, not beer!

Flying the “Repose of Sophie” without the concession of a glance, we mounted toward the ancient castle, whose ruins seemed ready to roll on us down the hillside.  It was indeed romantic.  The wind, in plaintive, melodious tones, searched our ears as it came perfumed from the tufted walls.  We penetrated through a scene of high and mossy rocks, bound in the lean embrace of knotted ivy, and finally by a dismantled postern we intruded into the castle.  Sacrilege again!  The stone-masons were tranquilly working here and there, solidifying old ruins and very probably fabricating new ones.  The wind, whose sighing we had admired, was the cat-like harmony of the aeolian harps:  these harps were artlessly stretched across each of the old vaulted windows.  We arrived at the high portal of the ancient manor, a genuine Roman construction of Aurelius Aquensis—­a gateway with a round arch:  it was obstructed by hired cabs, by whole herds of venal donkeys saddled and bridled, and by holiday-makers of Baden in Sunday clothes preserved for ten or fifteen years.  The old pile itself is transformed into a hostelry.  Gray was wrong:  the paths of glory lead not to the grave, but to the gasthaus; and Matthisson could have imitated the “Elegy” about as well in the gaming-hall as among these rejuvenated ruins.

The modern idea of a wood is a graveled chess-board on a large scale, flooded at night with gas:  the modern idea of a ruin is a dancing-floor, with a few patched arches and walls lifted between the wind and our nobility.  We shave the weeds away and produce a fine English turf:  we root up the brambles and eglantines which might tear the skirts of the ladies.  Our lovers, our poets and romancers must fly to distant glades if they would not walk in the shade of trees that have been transplanted.

I was considering the sorry triumph of the stage-machinists of Baden-Baden, when Berkley, who had disappeared, came in sight again.  Our dinner, he said, was ready—­ready in the guards’ hall.  I retreated with a sudden cry of alarm.  I had rather dine at the hotel; I had rather not dine at all; I was not in the least hungry.  It was the emptiness of my pocket that caused this sudden fullness, of the stomach.  Berkley made light of my objections.

“Listen!  You can hear from this mountain the dinner-bells of the city.  We should arrive too late.  Although you hate restored castles, you need not refuse to dine with me in one.”

[Illustration:  TYROLEAN.]