"
"But you are. I can see it in your face. You are thinking of something
strange. What is it?"
"Oh, never mind! It is not the name of the tower which surprises me. What
I am wondering at is, how it is that you, an old poacher, who had never
lived anywhere since you were a boy but amongst the fir forests, between
the snowy summits of the Wald Horn and the passes of the Rhethal--you
who, during all your prime of life, thought it the finest of fun to laugh
at the count's gamekeepers, and to scour the mountain paths of the
Schwartzwald, and boat the bushes there, and breathe the free air, and
bask in the bright sunshine amongst the hills and valleys--here I find
you, at the end of sixteen years of such a life, shut up in this red
granite hole. That is what surprises me and what I cannot understand.
Come, Sperver, light your pipe, and tell me all about it."
The old poacher took out of his leathern jacket a bit of a blackened
pipe; he filled it at his leisure, gathered up in the hollow of his hand
a live ember, which he placed upon the bowl of his pipe; then with his
eyes dreamily cast up to the ceiling he answered meditatively--
"Old falcons, gerfalcons, and hawks, when they have long swept the
plains, end their lives in a hole in a rock.
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