At last, in something like wondering despair, he muttered: "Confound the thing! I almost had it last night, and now I seem as far away from it as ever.

What on earth can be the matter with me ?" He put his elbows on the table, took his head between his hands, and stared down at the pages covered with angles and circles, chords and curves, and wildernesses of symbols, which were scattered about his desk.

As he stared at them they seemed somehow to come together, and the lines and curves arranged themselves in symmetrical shapes, until they developed from diagrams into pictures; and as they did so he found himself forgetting all about the problems, and thinking only of the strange vision which seemed to be unfolding itself among the scattered papers before him.

The straight lines became the walls and turrets of one of those two-or three-hundred-year-old German country houses, half castle, half mansion, which every explorer of the bye-paths of the Fatherland has seen and admired so often.

The curves became long, sweeping stretches of sandy bays, fringed with other curves of breaking rollers; and as the picture grew more distinct, one great circle embraced a whole perfect picture of land and seascape--land dusky and forest-covered in the southward half; and the misty sea, island-dotted, wind-whipped, and foam-flecked, to the northward.
The castle stood on the top of a somewhat steeply sloping hill about five hundred feet above the sandy shore, on which the breakers were curling a couple of miles away.