Part 22 (1/2)

Two or three pitched battles brought us to a friendly arrangement

The colonel exacted my promise that if I saw my father at Sarkeld in Eppenwelzen I would not stay with hier than seven days: and that if he was not there I would journey home forthwith When I had yielded the promise frankly on reed to furnish land in case I should require it A diligence engaged to deliver me within a fewher facts, and one to the squire, beginning, 'We were caught on our arrival in London by the thickest fog ever remembered,' as if it had been settled on my departure from Riversley that Te She said e had dined, about two hours before the starting of the diligence, 'Don't you think you ought to go and wish that captain of the vessel you sailed in goodbye?' I fell into her plot so far as to walk down to the quays on the river-side and reconnoitre the shi+p But there I saw my prison I kissed h not without regard for him Miss Goodwin lifted her eyelids at our reappearance As she made no confession of her treason I did not accuse her, and perhaps it ing to ashe drew h for a kiss to come of itself

Four-and-twenty German words of essential service to a traveller in Gere, and these were on paper transcribed by Miss Goodwin's own hand In the glooence, packed between Germans of a size that not even Tacitus had preparedstudy

Teht lasted

When that had fled, nothing was left us to combat the sensation that ere in the depths of a manure-bed, for the ere closed, the tobacco-s our ilowed in their pipe-bowls; they were silent, and gave out smoke and heat incessantly, like inanimate forces of nature I had most fantastic ideas,--that I had taken root and ripened, and must expect ed in the solid mass of the earth But I need not repeat theination froht, when I had well-nigh ceased to hope for it, showed us all like ed, or droretches in a cabin under water I had one Colossus bulging overfrom beneath a block of curly bearskin, was like that of one frozen in wonderher hills; the clouds over theh a valley in a fir-forest

CHAPTER XV WE ARE ACCOSTED BY A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE LADY IN THE FOREST

Bowls of hot coffee and milk, hite rolls of bread to dip in them, refreshed us at a forest inn For soeing puffs of steaain What we heard sounded like a language of the rocks and caves, and roots plucked up, a language of gluttons feasting; the word ja was like a door always on the hinge in every mouth Dumpy children, bulky men, cos, kept the villages partly alive We observed one young urchin sitting on a stone opposite a dog, and he and the dog took alternate bites off a platter-shaped cake, big enough to require both his hands to hold it Whether the dog ever snapped more than his share was oodat dinner ished our companions had enjoyed it They fed with their heads in their plates, splashed and clattered jaithout paying us any hospitable attention whatever, so that we had the dish of Lazarus They were perfectly kind, notwithstanding, and allowed a portion of reat ence, whilst Te the lines of the rivers One would thrust his square-nailed finger to the naave us lessons in the expression of the vowels, with the softening of three of the an egg into therepentance of the act 'Sarkeld,' we exclaibeyond the hills Sarkeld was to the right, Sarkeld to the left, as the road wound on Sarkeld was straight in front of us when the conductor, according to directions he had received, requested us to alight and push through this endless fir-forest up a hilly branch road, and away his hand galloped beyond it, corapes, then to a tip-toe station, and under it lay Sarkeld The pantoence, and set out cheerfully, with our bags at our backs, entering a gorge in the fir-covered hills before sunset, after starting the proposition--Does the sun hin country?

'Yes, he does,' said Teht, but denied it, for by the sun's favour I hoped to see ; a hope that greith exercise of ht water leaped down the gorge; we chased an invisible animal Suddenly one of us exclairihts, ladies, long-bearded dwarfs, gnoend off-hand

'No, no,' said Te; 'let's call this place the s don't hed louder than was necessary, and remarked that I never had cared so much for Greek as on board Captain Welsh's vessel

'It's because he was all on the opposite tack I went on quoting,' said Temple 'I used to read with my father in the holidays, and your Rev

Simon has kept you up to the mark; so it was all fair It 's not on our consciences that we cralad of it,' said I

Temple pursued, 'Whatever happens to a fellow, he canas he can say--I 've behaved like a man of honour And those German tales--they only upset you You don't see the reason of the thing Why is a man to be haunted half his life? Well, suppose he did coh an old castle without hosts? or a forest?'

The dusky scenery of a strange land was influencing Temple It affected me so, I made the worst of it for a cure

'Fancy those pines saying, ”There go two more,” Temple Well; and fancy this--a little earth-dwarf as broad as I'h as irl in the whole country, and she promised to marry him in twenty years' time, in return for a sack of jeorth all Ger it hoht it full of charcoal She married the man she loved, and the twenty years passed over, and at the stroke of the hour when she first h the forest, and her husband cries out, ”What is the arland of fresh flowers that dropped on her head, and right into a gold ring that closed on her finger, and--look, Temple, look!'

'Where?' asked the dear little fellow, looking in all earnest, froined, for, by suddenlyit with n indifference asa stone in it

We rounded the rocky corner of the gorge at a slightly accelerated pace in dead silence It opened out to restorative daylight, and we breathed better and chaffed one another, and, beholding a house with pendent gold grapes, applauded the diligence conductor's expressive pantoht of wine, but we held water preferable, so we toasted the Priscilla out of the palhts of water from a rill that had the sound of aspen-leaves, such as I used to listen to in the Riversleyelevations were in sight, some wooded, some bare We chose the nearest, to observe the sunset, and concurred in thinking it unlike English sunsets, though not so very unlike the sunset we had taken for sunrise on board the Priscilla A tu forest-land and slopes ofyellow burned down to smoky crilish enough' A glance at the sun's disc confir on the outline of the orb, one land

Yet theof ours vanished with it The coloured clouds drew es away from the recollection of ho pines, led us to suppose that Sarkeld ht toward the tower, instead of returning to the road, and struck confidently into a rugged path Recent events had given me the assurance that indirection I had aimed at the Bench--missed it--been shi+pped across sea and precipitated into the arms of friends who had seen him and could tell er blindly now

'Follow the path,' I said, when Temple wanted to have a consultation

'So we did in the London fog!' said he, with soht us here?' was a silencer