So the end of our Transylvanian sojourn had actually come, and like many things whose prospect appears so unconditionally desirable when viewed in the far distance, the realization of this wish now failed to bring altogether the anticipated satisfaction.

THE CAVERN CONVENT, SKIT LA JALOMITZA.

Whoever has read Hans Andersen’s exquisite tale of the fir-tree will understand the indescribable pathos assumed by commonplace objects as soon as they are relegated from the present tense into the past; and those who have not read this fairy tale will understand it equally well, for is not the story of the fir-tree the history of each of our own lives?

I had indeed often longed to be back again in the world; I had yearned to be once more within reach of newspapers and lending-libraries,{400} and to be able to get letters from England in three days instead of six. Of course I would return to the world some day or other; but that day need not have come just yet, I now told myself, and I should have liked to spend one more summer in face of that glorious chain of mountains I had got to love so dearly.

All at once I became acutely conscious of a dozen projects not yet accomplished—of points of interest as yet unvisited, of pictures I had not yet looked upon, of songs I had not heard. The proud snowy Negoi I had so often dreamed of ascending now smiled down an icy smile of unapproachable majesty upon my disappointment; the dark pine forests I had expected to revisit seemed to grow dim and shadowy as they eluded my grasp, and with them many other objects of my secret longing. That other mountain, the Bucsecs, where live those solitary monks, snowed up during the greater part of the year in their cavern convent scooped out of the rock; the noble castle of the great Hunyady, pearl of medi?val citadels; those wondrous salt-mines of Maros-Ujvar, whose description reads like a vision in a fairy tale; and those rivers whose waters may literally be said to “wander o’er sands of gold”—the thought of these, and of many other such items, now rose up like tormenting spectres to swell the mournful list of my blighted hopes. There were dozens of old ruined towers whose interior I had not yet seen, scores of little way-side chapels I had proposed to investigate. Why, even in this very town of Hermanstadt there were nooks and corners I had not explored, church-towers I had not ascended, and mysterious little gardens as yet unvisited. Precisely the most inviting-looking of these gardens, the most mysteriously suggestive, and the one which showed the richest promise of blossom peeping over the wall, had hitherto baffled all attempts at entrance. Nearly every day for the last two years I had passed by that garden, which towered over my head like a sea-bird’s nest perched on a steep rocky island, and always had I found the gate to be persistently locked against the outer world. Was I actually going to leave the place without having set foot within its enchanted precincts? without having plucked that head of golden laburnum just breaking into flower, which nodded so mockingly over the wall? and all at once an irresistible longing came over me; I felt that I must enter that garden, must gather that flower, even were it defended by dragons and witches.

And my wish did not seem to be impracticable at first sight—the{401} garden, as I knew, belonging to the cure, a jovial-faced old man, with whom I had merely a bowing acquaintance, but who, I felt sure, would be delighted to show me his garden. Accordingly one forenoon, about a week before my departure from Hermanstadt, I sent my two boys with a calling-card, on which was indited my request in the politest ter............