Carmilla

In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle,

or schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way.

Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours would

have answered among wealthy people at home. My father is English, and I

bear an English name, although I never saw England. But here, in this

lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvelously cheap, I

really don't see how ever so much more money would at all materially add

to our comforts, or even luxuries.

My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a pension and

his patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and the small estate

on which it stands, a bargain.

Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a slight

eminence in a forest. The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of

its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its moat, stocked with

perch, and sailed over by many swans, and floating on its surface white

fleets of water lilies.

Over all this the schloss shows its many-windowed front; its towers,

and its Gothic chapel.

The forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade before its

gate, and at the right a steep Gothic bridge carries the road over a

stream that winds in deep shadow through the wood. I have said that this

is a very lonely place. Judge whether I say truth. Looking from the hall

door towards the road, the forest in which our castle stands extends

fifteen miles to the right, and twelve to the left. The nearest

inhabited village is about seven of your English miles to the left. The

nearest inhabited schloss of any historic associations, is that of old

General Spielsdorf, nearly twenty miles away to the right.

I have said "the nearest inhabited village," because there is, only

three miles westward, that is to say in the direction of General

Spielsdorf's schloss, a ruined village, with its quaint little church,

now roofless, in the aisle of which are the moldering tombs of the proud

family of Karnstein, now extinct, who once owned the equally desolate

chateau which, in the thick of the forest, overlooks the silent ruins

of the town.

Respecting the cause of the desertion of this striking and melancholy

spot, there is a legend which I shall relate to you another time.

I must tell you now, how very small is the party who constitute the

inhabitants of our castle. I don't include servants, or those dependents

who occupy rooms in the buildings attached to the schloss. Listen, and

wonder! My father, who is the kindest man on earth, but growing old; and

I, at the date of my story, only nineteen. Eight years have passed

since then.