GRETCHEN'S first impulse was to exclaim in wonder, her second to recoil in fear. There was a mixture of beauty and horror about the spot, which put to nought every description she had heard of the place. All around, the moss and ferns wreathed in wasteful abundance. Up to the very edge of the horrible abyss did the ivy creep boldly; and not up to the edge only, but over it the green trails had ventured. There were clinging plants of all descriptions, contending with each other as to which of them should reach down the deepest to sound that gaping space below. They hung in a heavy fringe, down into the darkness, scarcely stirred by the breeze, nor even touched by the sunshine; and the lowest hanging leaves of these venturesome trails were pale for want of full light, as are plants which have been grown in a cellar. Trails have hung down this way year by year, have budded in spring, and have dropped their leaves down into the gulf below them when autumn came round. Myriads of withered leaves must have fluttered down there, away from the light; but none have ever come back to tell the tale of what they had seen below.

The very beauty all around made the horror of the spot more palpable. The stately ferns waved here as peacefully as though they grew in some quiet dell; the ivy twined as soberly as though it clothed an old church tower; and the innocent flowerets peep over the edge. But

VOL. CXXXVII.-NO. DCCCXXXVI.

-Macbeth.

there is treason in them, one and all. They are the beautiful mask of a hideous thing; they are the smiling ornaments which have decked out this hidden trap. There is not one leaflet which trembles there, not one floweret which blooms, that does not deserve to be rooted out and left to wither. Stripped of its wreath of verdure, Gaura Dracului would also be stripped of half its peril. If that black hole were cut in the naked rock, and bared on all sides to view, it would be a frightful object, but it would no longer be the lurking danger which it now is. Nothing but a fiendish cunning, you might fancy, could have contrived to turn so much beauty to so cruel an account.

"A horrid yawning black hole," as Adalbert had said; and his words were strictly true. And yet not one of the four people now standing on the edge of the hole but did not feel conscious that each had carried within them a different picture to this. The picture in each mind would have as widely differed from the other in the painting of details, as each picture was different from the reality before them. It was not that it was less horrible, or less black, or less beautiful than they had imagined, but that it was horrible and beautiful in some inexplicably different way from that which they had expected.

Gretchen had known that the spot would be awful; but she had not thought that the awfulness would make itself felt in this sen

31

sible, almost tangible manner. Against her own will she stepped back shuddering. The sense of immeasurable depth, the black vacancy, with the suggestion of a deeper blacker vacancy below, made her giddy. It was not difficult to understand why the peasants called the spot haunted, and invented legends as apologies for their fear. Standing beside it now in the gloom of twilight, Gretchen felt a shiver run over her. For centuries this hole had stood open: it was a necessity almost that one, or more than one, victim had fallen into its jaws. Each of the four persons who stood now in awed silence by the edge, instinctively conjured up visions of frightful tragedies. A traveller lost in the dark-how, when coming down the slope of that bank, could he avoid walking straight into the arms of death? One step would be enough now to send any of them headlong to destruction.

Kurt was the one who appeared the least impressed. He picked up a stone and flung it down. It flashed out of sight, bounded from rock to rock, fainter and always fainter; then came an interval of silence-it must have reached the bottom: no, a far, far-off sound told them that it was still falling. Not till now had they realised the awful depth. They threw another stone, and counted the time of its fall upon the second-hand of Mr Howard's watch. There was the same flash, the same bounds, the same horribly suggestive interval of silence, and then the distant rattling sound again. During half a minute an attentive ear could still catch the faint sound of a fall; and even then, when it died away, they were left with the impression that it had not stopped falling, but was only too far off to be heard any longer.

They say to hell, don't they?" said István, suddenly. He had not spoken since Gretchen's appearance on the spot; he was now standing close to the edge, gazing down the hole with a fixed and abstracted stare. Strange that I should never have come across it before now?"

that it leads straight

66

"And we were so near it that first day," said Gretchen, drawing back another step from the edge. "I do not see how we can have missed it."

"That is because we took the turn to the left-the way the Bohemian has gone for water."

"And where does that lead?" asked Mr Howard.

"To the frontier: we are not half an hour from Roumania here.”

The bushes rustled close to them, and the Bohemian appeared upon the scene, pale, dishevelled, and wellnigh breathless. In his left hand he held Gretchen's waterflask; with his right he beat his breast violently, while he stood struggling to recover his breath.

The mild face of this peacefully inclined man had never so nearly approached to passion as it did at this moment.

"Heilige Maria!" he gasped out-" Heilige Muttergottes of the Wunderbaum at Choteborschwitz! My vow! my sacred vow! I have not broken it. Der liebe Herrgott knows I am innocent!"

"Of course you are innocent," said Gretchen, laying her hand on the arm of the excited man. "We have found Gaura Dracului; but your vow is safe."

"No reason that I can see for such excitement," observed Kurt, composedly.

"I am thankful that we have not allowed that fellow's superstitious folly to baffle us," remarked Mr Howard, with satisfaction.

"How did you find it?" asked the Bohemian, wiping his forehead with an unsteady hand, while, still exhausted, he leant against a tree. Gretchen explained to him the secret of the three crosses.

"Those three crosses! I have seen them often, Fräulein, when the tree was still upright. They have puzzled me too."

He drew a long breath; and then, partially recovering his composure, offered her the water-flask. "You have waited long, Fräulein; your thirst must be terrible." "The water!" said Gretchen, looking blankly at the flask.

"The water you sent me to fetch," the Bohemian repeated, holding the flask towards her.

"But Dr Komers?" she said; "did you not meet him? He went after you to tell you we had already found water. Mr Howard's flask was full."

"I did not meet the Herr Doctor. I came back to the tree-trunk, and when I saw the bundle still lying there, and you gone, guessed you would be here,-I was afraid of it."

"Komers will be waiting for us at the tree," decided Kurt-"depend upon it."

"Unless he has lost his way meantime," said Tolnay, with a grim laugh.

"Which would be a nasty job about here," added Mr Howard.

"Oh, I hope he will be careful!" cried Gretchen, drawing back another step from the abyss.

She saw a gleam of jealousy in Tolnay's eyes.

"That man is always careful," sneered István, just under his breath; "but even careful men can sometimes lose their way."

The Bohemian had by this time recovered himself to some extent, though he still leant against the tree-stem.

"Those three crosses!" he repeated, with a dissatisfied shake of the head. "If I had but known it! It always struck me that they were too well cut to be done by a goat-herd. If I had but known what they meant !"

"And if you had known what they meant?"

"I should have destroyed them." "Come!" cried Mr Howard, "this is growing preposterous. This fellow's obstinacy beats anything in my experience. What was all that rubbish he told us about the place? What is it that the Greek fellow down there swore on his club?"

"A victim every century," said the Bohemian, and the old scared expression came back to his face.

Why, the man looks as if he had been down the hole himself, or chucked some one else over," said Mr Howard, eyeing him severely. "It can't be superstition alone that sets him shaking in his shoes this way."

"Superstition! Heilige Jungfrau of the Wunderbaum at Choteborschwitz! we are not superstitious, we Bohemians, like the people of this strange country," sighed the man, with the resignation of an exile; "and neither have I ever seen any man or woman go down into that blackness. But -but

"But you have heard of such a thing happening?" finished Gretchen, bending an imperious glance upon him. "Tell us the story!"

"It is the story of my vow," he faltered.

twisted up the cap between them, it was evident that he was going through a sharp tussle with his conscience. Finally, the desire to justify himself against the charge of superstition triumphed, and he spoke.

'Fräulein," he began in a tremulous voice, still leaning against the tree-stem beside him, you will remember how I told you that both I and my father were born in this strange country, and that it was my grandfather who accepted the offer which the Government had made him, and left his nation to settle here. It was a rich farm which they gave him. He brought his young wife with him, and his only child was born here soon after he had settled down; and yet he should have rued the day when he came to this land. He had not been settled a year in the valley when a Wallachian who worked on his farm told him the story of Gaura Dracului, and of the treasure which the brigands had buried there, and which no one had found.

"My grandfather loved gold. The story inflamed his thirst for riches. For weeks he dreamt of nothing else; and at last he determined, in concert with the Wallachian labourer, to whom he promised half the gain, to sound the depth of the Devil's Hole.

"The two went up in secret— not even my grandmother knew the object of the expedition; and it was only next day, when the Wallachian came back alone, half mad with terror, and told her how the

rope had broken in his hands, and his companion plunged into the abyss before his eyes, it was only then that she heard of Gaura Dracului."

The Bohemian broke off, and crossed himself. No one spoke for a moment. Very swift, very

silent, very terrible must such a death have been.

"When I was ten years old,” said the Bohemian, "my father took me up here to this place and showed it to me. He made me swear by my devotion to the Wunderbaum at Choteborschwitz that I would never reveal the spot to anybody. It was his mother, my grandmother I remember her still -who had told him the story."

"But," said Gretchen, after a moment of silence, "I cannot see what logical object your father had with that vow. The more the place is known, the less danger there would be of a person stumbling in."

"That may be, Fräulein, but I was bound to hold my vow. My father meant it for the best, no doubt. I have seldom come to the spot myself, and I never cut shingles in this part of the forest. I saw something happen here long ago when I was a child, which made me sad for many days. There were two young kids which had strayed near this place, and on that bank above they began to butt at each other in play. was the prettiest sight you could see, and I laughed as I looked on; but I stopped laughing very soon. One of them made a false step; he had got his horns entangled with his playfellow's horns, and the two fell together down that hole. They went straight down; there was not a sound; it was all quiet in a moment."

It

"And I suppose that the devils had roast-kid for dinner that day,” observed Kurt, flippantly.

"We once carried a big stone here," went on the Bohemian, unperturbed "I and some peasants who knew of the spot. It took six of us to carry it; and when we threw it down, the breath of air which came up knocked the caps off our six heads as if with a blow."

"And another time," went on the Bohemian calmly, "we let a man down with ropes. We had fifty yards of rope, but it was not enough. Next day we came back with double as much rope; but when we had lost sight of the man, we heard him calling up, for he had taken fright: and after that we did not meddle with the place again."

"Bah!" said Mr Howard, "in ten years the measurement of the depth will be reduced to a mathematical calculation."

"That is what papa says," observed Gretchen; "and he believes, too, that there is some outlet below."

"That is the secret of the mountains, Fräulein; and the mountains do not chatter. According to the story of the brigands' treasure, some such passage would need to exist. I know of one story only which seems to confirm it. My father was told by an old peasant, who died at ninety years of age, that a brother of his had a dog whom he wanted to be rid of, and so he just took him up to the wood and knocked him into the hole. He was sure never to see him again; but ten days after that, as he was leaving his house in the morning, there on the doorstep the dog was sitting, nothing but skin and bone, and scratches all over. Nobody knows where he came from. The peasants said he was not good enough for the devils, and that therefore they let him go again." "Too thin for roasting," suggested Kurt. "They might have made broth of him, though."

But even Kurt's irreverence failed to disturb the gravity of the others. No story of Gaura Dra

cului sounded too extravagant as long as Gaura Dracului lay before the listeners' eyes. In Gretchen's head there was ringing the air of the Bohemian's melancholy song, and the monotonous refrain

"Beware, beware!

Of Gaura Dracului beware!"

It seemed to her that that Roman woman, sacrificed to blind jealousy, should henceforward, from a legendary myth, become to her an authentic personage. Had she not stood beside the hapless victim's grave?

It was a place to pursue a man in his dreams, to haunt him even by broad daylight. The shiver of interest which it awoke was both exquisite and painful. While longing to be away, one yet was loath to leave it. Some such feeling it was which kept them all silent now as they stood around it. The fascination seemed to be strongest upon István. He slowly paced round the edge, with his eye fixed on the blackness below, stepping sometimes so perilously near to the deceitful brink as to deal nervous starts to his companions, and to call forth many an invocation to the Heilige Jungfrau of the Wunderbaum at Choteborschwitz from the scared Bohemian.

"Tell me," said Gretchen to the guide, "have you ever heard of any other accident happening here, except the death of your grandfather?"

"Never any other, Fräulein: there may have been accidents here, or there may not. Those who go down there do not come back to tell us stories. You know what the peasants here say. I told you of their superstition.' "A victim every century," said Tolnay, half aloud.

"And when was it that your grandfather was killed?" asked Mr Howard.