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Rh have cared as little to come to close quarters with one whose strength had become proverbial, as to get themselves into trouble by tampering with the State courier of a great power.

It had been a splendid day in the young autumn, and it was just upon its close as he went through the forests, his mare, a pure-bred sorrel, scarcely touching the ground as she swept along, swift as a greyhound or a lapwing. The air was heavily scented with the fragrance of the firs; the last lingering rays of light slanted here and there across the moss through dark fanlike boughs, cone-laden; aisles of pines stretched in endless and innumerable lines of paths scarce ever trodden save by the wolf, or the wild boar, or the charcoal-burner, barely more human than the brute; and, in the rear, to the westward, towered the Carpathians, with their black rugged sides reared in the purple sunset, the guard of the Magyar fatherland.

Now and then, at rare intervals, a little hamlet buried in the recesses of the forest, whose few wretched women wore the Turkish yashmak, spoke of Moldavia, or he came on a camp of naked wild-eyed gipseys of the country; but as evening closed in, and Erceldoune advanced into a narrow rocky defile, the nearest passage through dense pine solitudes,