Greif was deeply attached to the University town. He had spent many happy hours within its walls, and had passed through many exciting moments of his young life amidst its high, narrow streets and ancient buildings. Such a place naturally exercised a greater influence over him than over most men of his age. Born and bred in the heart of the Black Forest, brought up in the house that had sheltered his race for centuries, he would have felt uneasy and out of his element if he had been all at once transported to a modern capital. But in Schwarzburg he felt that he was at home. The huge cathedral with its spires and arches and rich fretwork of dark stone, seemed to him the model of what all cathedrals should be. The swift river that ran between overhanging buildings, and beneath old bridges that were carved with armorial bearings and decorated with the rare ironwork of cunning smiths, famous long ago, bore in its breast the legends of his own forest home, and was impersonated in many a verse he had learned to sing with his comrades. The shady nooks and corners, the turns in the crooked streets, the dark archways of old inns, the swinging signs with their rich deep colour and Gothic characters, the projecting balconies, glazed with round bull’s eyes of blown glass set in heavy lead, the marvellously wrought weathercocks of iron and gold on the corners of the houses, every outward detail of the time-honoured and time-mellowed town spoke to his heart in accents he not only understood but loved. Even the modern note did not jar upon him. There were few officers in the streets, few soldiers in bright uniforms. Occasionally a troop of white cuirassiers rode slowly through the main thoroughfare, looking more like mediaeval knights than Prussian soldiers. Their enormous stature, their bronzed faces, their snow-white dress and gleaming corslets, the stately, solemn tramp of their great horses, their straight broad blades without curve or bend erect at their sides, all made them utterly unlike the ordinary soldiery of present times, and rendered their appearance perfectly harmonious with their surroundings. Even the students in their long boots and coloured caps did not look modern, as they strolled along in knots of three and four from the University to the mess at dinner-time, or thronged the pavements of the high street towards evening, when the purple light was on the cathedral spires and the shadows were deepening below.