gardens which may be supposed
essential to a prince's hunting establishment in that period. It stood at a
distance of eighteen miles from Klosterheim, and presented the sole oasis of
culture and artificial beauty throughout the vast extent of those wild tracts of
silvan ground.
    The great central pile of the building was dismantled of furniture; but the
travellers carried with them, as was usual in the heat of war, all the means of
fencing against the cold, and giving even a luxurious equipment to their
dormitories. In so large a party, the deficiencies of one were compensated by
the redundant contributions of another. And, so long as they were not under the
old Roman interdict, excluding them from seeking fire and water of those on whom
their day's journey had thrown them, their own travelling stores enabled them to
accommodate themselves to all other privations. On this occasion, however, they
found more than they had expected; for there was at Falkenberg a store of all
the game in season, constantly held up for the use of the Landgrave's household,
and the more favoured monasteries at Klosterheim. The small establishment of
keepers, foresters, and other servants, who occupied the chateau, had received
no orders to refuse the hospitality usually practised in the Landgrave's name;
or thought proper to dissemble them in their present circumstances of inability
to resist. And, having from necessity permitted so much, they were led by a
sense of their master's honour, or their own sympathy with the condition of so
many women and children, to do more. Rations of game were distributed liberally
to all the messes; wine was not refused by the old kellermeister, who rightly
considered that some thanks, and smiles of courteous acknowledgment, might be a
better payment than the hard knocks with which military paymasters were
sometimes apt to settle their accounts. And upon the whole it was agreed that no
such evening of comfort and even luxurious enjoyment had been spent since their
departure from Vienna.
    One wing of the chateau was magnificently furnished; this, which of itself
was tolerably extensive, had been resigned to the use of Paulina, Maximilian,
and others of the military gentlemen, whose manners and deportment seemed to
entitle them to superior attentions. Here, amongst many marks of refinement and
intellectual culture, there was a library and a gallery of portraits. In the
library, some of the officers had detected sufficient evidences of the Swedish
alliances clandestinely maintained by the Landgrave; numbers of rare books,
bearing the arms of different Imperial cities, which, in the several campaigns
of Gustavus, had been appropriated as they