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By spurring and coaxing, I luredit that though you may lead a horse to the water you cannot make hih I had brought mine to the water I could not make him swim; or, at least, I could not e hihed, and struggled ga us swiftly away, and his efforts brought us no nearer to the opposite shore At last I slipped fro him by the bridle But even thus he proved unequal to the task of resisting the current, so that in the end I let hi that he would land farther down, and that I ht then recapture him When, however, I had reached the opposite bank, and stood under the shadow of the chateau, I discovered that the cowardly beast had turned back, and, having scra the path by which we had coned myself to the loss, and turned my attention to the mansion now before reat square bulk against the background of black, star-flecked sky From the facade before ht of half a dozen terraces, each balustraded in whitein square, flat-topped pillars of Florentine design What moon there was revealed the quaint architecture of that stately edifice and glittered upon the liht; no sound of ht, for all that the hour was early The air of the place was as that of so stillness, I skirted the terraces and approached the house on the eastern side Here I found an old-world drawbridge--now naturally in disuse--spanning a ditch fed from the main river for the erstwhile purposes of acourtyard Within this quadrangle the same silence dwelt, and there was the same obscurity in the s that overlooked it I paused, at a loss how to proceed, and I leaned against a buttress of the portcullis, what time I considered