For even old Hanne flouted me and would not let me approach her too closely, all because once I had asked her what my father did to witches, and if she were a witch that she crossed herself and trembled whenever she passed him in the court-yard.

Now, having little else to do, I loved to look down from the top of the tower at all times.  But never more so than when there was snow on the ground, for then the City of Thorn lay apparent beneath me, all spread out like a painted picture, with its white and red roofs and white houses bright in the moonlight—­so near that it seemed as though I could pat every child lying asleep in its little bed, and scrape away the snow with my fingers from every red tile off which the house-fires had not already melted it.

The town of Thorn was the chief place of arms, and high capital city of all the Wolfmark.  It was a thriving place, too, humming with burghers and trades and guilds, when our great Duke Casimir would let them alone; perilous, often also, with pikes and discontents when he swooped from the tall over-frowning Castle of the Wolfsberg upon their booths and guilderies—­“to scotch the pride of rascaldom,” as he told them when they complained.  In these days my father was little at home, his business keeping him abroad all the day about the castle-yard, at secret examinations in the Hall of Judgment, or in mysterious vaults in the deepest parts of the castle, where the walls are eighteen feet thick, and from which not a groan can penetrate to the outside while the Duke Casimir’s judgment was being done upon the poor bodies and souls of men and women his prisoners.

In the court-yard, too, the dogs, fierce russet-tan blood-hounds, ravined for their fearsome food.  And in these days there was plenty of it, too, so that they were yelling and clamoring all day, and most of the night, for that which it made me sweat to think of.  And beneath the rebellious city cowered and muttered, while the burghers and their wives shivered in their beds as the howling of Duke Casimir’s blood-hounds came fitfully down the wind, and Duke Casimir’s guards clashed arms under their windows.

So this night I looked down contentedly enough from my perched eyrie on the top of the Red Tower.  It had been snowing a little earlier in the evening, and the brief blast had swept the sky clean, so that even the brightest stars seemed sunken and waterlogged in the white floods of moonlight.  Under my hand lay the city.  Even the feet of the watch made no clatter on the pavements.  The fresh-fallen snow masked the sound.  The kennels of the blood-hounds were silent, for their dreadful tenants were abroad that night on the Duke’s work.

Yet, sitting up there on the Wolfsberg, it seemed to me that I could distinguish a muttering as of voices full of hate, like men talking low on their beds the secret things of evil and treason.  I discerned discontent and rebellion rumbling and brooding over the city that clear, keen night of early winter.