We were riding in a gig driven by a boy who sat on one of the shafts.

His hat had no strings and consequently blew off occasionally, and during his efforts to catch it, we had plenty of time to admire the landscape.
The Chateau de la Roche-Maurice is a real burgrave's castle, a vulture's nest on the top of a mountain.

It is reached by an almost perpendicular slope along which great blocks of stone are strewn in place Of steps.

At the top is a wall built of huge stones laid one above another, and in the wall are large windows, through which the whole surrounding country can be viewed; the woods, the fields, the river, the long, white road, the mountains with their uneven peaks, and the great meadow, which separates them through the middle.
A crumbling flight of steps leads to a dilapidated tower.

Here and there stones crop out among the grass, and the rock shows amid the stones.
Sometimes it seems as if this rock assumed artificial shapes, and as if the ruins, on the contrary, by crumbling more and more, had taken on a natural appearance and gone back to original matter.
A whole side of the wall is covered with ivy; it begins at the bottom and spreads out in an inverted pyramid, the color of which grows darker towards the top.