Page:German Stories (Volumes 2–3).djvu/273



CHAPTER I.

was during that eventful period when the murder of D’Enghien, the execution of Palm, and many other violent outrages of the French tyrant had filled all Germany with terror and apprehension, that the young Baron, Ernest von Sonnenberg, returned to the castle of his ancestors, which he had left when a boy of ten years old, and from whence he had for the last eleven years been an exile.

Indeed he still looked with a feeling of horror on the place of his nativity, from the recollection of a dreadful event that had happened there; for one night his father had been found murdered in the neighbouring forest. The impression