CARMILLA

I

_An Early Fright_

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.