CHAPTER XX.
SECRET VISITORS.
Soon came winter.

The cold, frosty, snow-laden season began; nothing but white forests, white fields, are to be seen in every quarter of the level _Alfoeld_, and as early as four o'clock in the afternoon the dark-grey, lilac-coloured atmosphere begins to envelope the horizon all round about, rising higher and higher every moment, till at last the very vault of heaven is reached, and it is night.

Only the snowy whiteness of the plain preserves some gleam of light to the landscape.
Pale fallow stripes appear to have been drawn across the snowy expanse; they are the tracks of the sledges, stretching from one village to another.
Karpathy Castle seemed to make the uniform monotonous landscape still more melancholy.

At other times the windows, of an evening, shed their light far and wide, and merry groups of sportsmen bustled about the well-filled courtyard; but now, scarcely more than a gleam of light was to be seen in two or three of the windows, and only the blue smoke of the chimneys showed that it was still inhabited.
Alone on these dun-coloured roads, in the fall of the long winter evening, a peasant's sledge, without bells, might have been seen gliding along through that featureless, semi-obscure wilderness towards Karpathy Castle.
In the rear of the sledge sat a man wrapped in a simple mantle; in front, a peasant, in a sheepskin _bunda_, was driving the two lean horses.
The sitter behind frequently stood up in the sledge, and swept the plain on every side, as if he were in search of something.

The preserves of the Karpathy estate loomed darkly before him, and by the time they reached a ramshackle old wooden bridge, the visitor perceived what he sought.
"Those are pine-trees, are they not ?" he inquired of the coachman.
"Yes, young sir; one can recognize them from a distance, for they are still green when the others have shed their leaves." They were the only trees of the sort in the whole region.