The nearest inhabited schloss of any historic associations, is that of old General Spielsdorf, nearly twenty miles away to the right. The nearest inhabited village is about seven of your English miles to the left. Looking from the hall door towards the road, the forest in which our castle stands extends fifteen miles to the right, and twelve to the left. I have said that this is a very lonely place. The forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade before its gate, and at the right a steep Gothic bridge carries the road over a stream that winds in deep shadow through the wood. Over all this the schloss shows its many-windowed front its towers, and its Gothic chapel. The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its moat, stocked with perch, and sailed over by many swans, and floating on its surface white fleets of water lilies. It stands on a slight eminence in a forest. Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a pension and his patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and the small estate on which it stands, a bargain. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvelously cheap, I really don't see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries.
My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England. Scantily enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way. In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss.
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