PICTURED WINDOWS After wide wanderings through the valley, the two travellers directed their course towards its boundary of hills.

Here, the natural scenery and men's modifications of it immediately took a different aspect from that of the fertile and smiling plain.

Not unfrequently there was a convent on the hillside; or, on some insulated promontory, a mined castle, once the den of a robber chieftain, who was accustomed to dash down from his commanding height upon the road that wound below.

For ages back, the old fortress had been flinging down its crumbling ramparts, stone by stone, towards the grimy village at its foot.
Their road wound onward among the hills, which rose steep and lofty from the scanty level space that lay between them.

They continually thrust their great bulks before the wayfarers, as if grimly resolute to forbid their passage, or closed abruptly behind them, when they still dared to proceed.