It was the setting of a dream of romance.
It would have been the very spot in which to read a volume of German
folk-lore, and the darkening colonnades and silent nooks of the forest
seemed already haunted with the voices and shadows of those charming elves
and goblins.
As I sat here enjoying the solitude and my fancies among the low branches
of the wood, at my right I heard a crashing, and saw a squat broad figure
in a stained and tattered military coat, and loose short trousers, one limb
of which flapped about a wooden leg. He was forcing himself through. His
face was rugged and wrinkled, and tanned to the tint of old oak; his eyes
black, beadlike, and fierce, and a shock of sooty hair escaped from under
his battered wide-awake nearly to his shoulders. This forbidding-looking
person came stumping and jerking along toward me, whisking his stick now
and then viciously in the air, and giving his fell of hair a short shake,
like a wild bull preparing to attack.
I stood up involuntarily with a sense of fear and surprise, almost fancying
I saw in that wooden-legged old soldier, the forest demon who haunted Der
Freischuetz.
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