The paper became a talisman in his thoughts,--a thing endowed with magic properties to make him invisible like the cloak or cap of the fairy tales.

Those few lines in writing not a week back had seemed an unattainable prize, yet he had them; and so now they promised him that other unattainable thing, the enlargement of the Princess.

It was in his nature, too, to grow buoyant in proportion to the difficulties of his task.

He rode forward, therefore, with a good heart, and one sombre evening of rain came to a village some miles beyond Augsburg.
The village was a straggling half-mile of low cottages, lost as it were on the level of a wide plain.

Across this plain, bare but for a few lines of poplars and stunted willow-trees, Wogan had ridden all the afternoon; and so little did the thatched cottages break the monotony of the plain's appearance, that though he had had the village within his vision all that while, he came upon it unawares.