The Price He Paid — page 73: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

64 LIVING IN REBELLION. jagged and rugged, with their stretches of green meadow and dark patches of forest, out from which, here and there, a pilgrim’s shrine shone, whitely, or a ruined fortress, gray with age, reared its crumb- ling walls. No stronger contrast could have been found than this beaming landscape without, and the deep, cool shade of the castle-garden, buried in its somber quiet. The mighty crests: of the limes, with their closely woven boughs, shed a sort of mild green twilight on the space below, and from beneath the tall trees came the monotonous plash of the foun- tain. In unvarying alternation the crystal column rose on high, splintered into.a thousand fragments, and sank to earth again. The still, sultry noon seemed to have hushed all nature into dreamy repose. Not a bird fluttered, not a leaf stirred; from the Nixies’ Wellalone came a mysterious murmur, breaking the deep stillness. Thus from time immemorial had the spring rippled and dabbled here on the castle-hill; for more than a century now, had this faithful companion fulfilled its duty, acronis the solitude, enlivening the sequestered retreat of the castle-garden. The old statues, which had so long protectingly surrounded it, were to fall, and the bubbling water was to be driven from the cheery light of day down into the dark earth beneath, there to be held captive for- evermore. Were its import a complaint, or a tale of whispered memories, that dreamy murmur exercised a strange fascindtion over the grave, unbending man, who had never known the musings of solitude or its poetic inspirations, and over the youthful blooming maiden at his side, who, with laughing lips and a merry heart, had hitherto fluttered joyously on her course, unheeding, ignorant of life’s earnest. All the fierce wrestling and striving on the one hand, all the happy childish fancies on the other, were resolved, as it were, into some nameless strange sensation, half-sweet, half-troubled, which held the two in thralldom. So, as they sat listening to the ripple and purl of the water, unvarying, and Eomichooks. co