No place is more calculated to call forth all the vagaries of the imagination than an old half-ruined castle, surrounded by wood and mount, hoar from many centuries, and lying in such deep seclusion, as to be unseen by the mere casual traveller. On such a spot, completely circled by a branch of the Cevennes, in the ancient district of Auvergne, it was once my hap to light. Trees of such gigantic growth, that they appeared bending beneath the weight of ages, frowning rocks, and overgrown brushwood formed so close a fortification, that the building might have been passed and repassed within a mile of its vicinity undiscovered.

It was a gothic chateau of the olden time, just sufficiently ruinous to give it the interest of age, yet containing costly tapestried chambers, panelled halls, long rambling galleries, secret rooms, and those deep dark dungeons, where many a brave man has languished and died unknown, save by his ruthless captor, all still in sufficient preservation to fill the mind with visions of the past as with the breathing realities of the present. There was a small chapel in the building, which had once been evidently richly adorned, but whose shrines and hangings were now all crumbling to decay. It was a melancholy visionary place, yet infused with a charm impossible to be resisted, and day after day my wanderings turned to the chateau; contented at first with rambling over chamber, hall, and gallery, imagination feasting on the thoughts of what had been the life, the stir, the pageantry, where all was now the solitude of silence and neglect. There were still some pictures hanging from the walls, but seemingly so resigned to the cobweb and the dust, that I had heeded them little, till one day the sun gleaming upon an antique frame, unobserved before, attracted me to the picture it enshrined, and in a moment heart, mind, and fan............