And now back to the story with David Larsen. Having turned into a thick and unvisited quarter of the forest, La Motte's carriage is suddenly overturned, losing a wheel! And those things aren't easy to rebuild. It's quite beyond the capacities of La Motte's clownish servant Peter, and so they're stuck. It happens that their breakdown takes place outside the gates of a gigantic ruined abbey standing "on a kind of rude lawn, overshadowed by high and spreading trees, which seemed coeval with the building, and diffused a romantic gloom around. The greater part of the pile appeared to be sinking into ruins, and that, which had withstood the ravages of time, shewed the remaining features of the fabric more awful in decay. The lofty battlements, thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished, and became the residence of birds of prey. Huge fragments of the eastern tower, which was almost demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass, that waved slowly to the breeze. 'The thistle shook its lonely head; the moss whistled to the wind.' " (Chloe Chard notes that this last line is quoted from the lays of Ossian.) In fact it is in La Motte's haste to get away from the forboding scene that the wheel is lost, and his party is forced to take up residence in the abbey's blasted remains.

Much of the abbey is roofless and overrun with briars. Its sheltered spaces are infested with owls and ravens, and bats too probably (though Radcliffe's otherwise omniscient narrator has neglected so far to mention them). On entering the abbey's western tower, however, La Motte discovers "a spacious apartment, which, from its style and condition, was evidently of a much later date than the other part of the structure: though desolate and forlorn, it was very little impaired by time; the walls were damp, but not decayed; and the glass was yet firm in the windows." And now for the funny part, which is that the sleeping horror of the abbey will be found to lie not in the mouldering ruin, where one might expect it, but in the undamaged latter-day partitionings of the western tower. That's all I have for you now --more soon --