As the prospect opened out on both sides,
at the turn of a narrow defile, suddenly, like a picture in a black
frame, between two mountain slopes, thickly covered with dark
beech-trees, the castle of Hidvar came full in view, standing lonely and
isolated on the summit of a hill. The mountain torrent shot swiftly down
beneath a shaky bridge. The round moon stood straight over the tower of
the castle, as if it had been impaled on the point of it, and painted
everything with its silvery light, the tower, the bastions, the brook
and the valley--only one thing it brightened not, the heart of the young
wife.
CHAPTER VII
THE CAVERN OF LUCSIA
Not so very long ago there was in Transylvania a wide-spreading society
of coiners which, it is now notorious, had carried on its nefarious
business undetected for more than half a century. The science was an
inheritance descending from father to son, people married and were born
into it. Careful parents trained their children to follow it, and a very
lucrative profession it proved to be. That it should have remained
undiscovered for so long a time, that it should have been plied
successfully for more than fifty years under the very noses of the
authorities--all this was capable of a very simple explanation, _these
men coined gold pieces_.
Yes, genuine ducats, of full weight, out of real three-and-twenty carat
gold, without any admixture of baser metal, so that they absolutely
could not be distinguished from the royal ducats of the authorized
minting towns, Koermoecz and Gyulafehervar.
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