navvy boots across the irregular and precarious stepping-stones, over which
I dared not follow her; so I was fain to return to the stone so 'pure
and flat,' on which I sat, enjoying the grand sylvan solitude, the dark
background and the grey bridge mid-way, so tall and slim, across whose
ruins a sunbeam glimmered, and the gigantic forest trees that slumbered
round, opening here and there in dusky vistas, and breaking in front into
detached and solemn groups. It was the setting of a dream of romance.

It would have been the very spot in which to read a volume of German
folk-lore, and the darkening colonnades and silent nooks of the forest
seemed already haunted with the voices and shadows of those charming elves
and goblins.

As I sat here enjoying the solitude and my fancies among the low branches
of the wood, at my right I heard a crashing, and saw a squat broad figure
in a stained and tattered military coat, and loose short trousers, one limb
of which flapped about a wooden leg. He was forcing himself through. His
face was rugged and wrinkled, and tanned to the tint of old oak; his eyes
black, beadlike, and fierce, and a shock of sooty hair escaped from under
his battered wide-awake nearly to his shoulders. This forbidding-looking
person came stumping and jerking along toward me, whisking his stick now
and then viciously in the air, and giving his fell of hair a short shake,
like a wild bull preparing to attack.

I stood up involuntarily with a sense of fear and surprise, almost fancying
I saw in that wooden-legged old soldier, the forest demon who haunted Der
Freischütz.

So he approached shouting--