He had been through great battles, he had seen the world in convulsion, his life a dozen times had hung on a hair, and since it is experience that makes a man he was older than most of those twice his age.
He was stopping after his custom at an obscure inn, and in the moonlight he strolled through the little city.

In its place among the mountains on both sides of the gray-green river it was full of romance to him, romance colored all the more deeply by memory.

Off there among those peaks the _Arrow_ had first come for him and Lannes, while here the great Mozart had been born and lay buried.

In remoter days Huns had swept through these passes, coming from Asian deserts to the pillage of Europe.
John sat down on a bench in the little square before the cathedral and looked up at the mountains.

He knew the exact location in which lay Zillenstein, the ancient seat of the Auersperg race, and he calculated that in two days he could reach it on foot, the lone youth in peasant's garb, pursuing the powerful prince and general, surrounded by retainers and hussars and in the land of his ancestors.
John wondered what had become of his comrades.