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,
coming to a deep place, and then to grapes, then to a tip-toe station,
and under it lay Sarkeld. The pantomime was not bad. We waved our hand to
the diligence, 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 himself look foreign in a foreign country?

'Yes, he does,' said Temple; and so I thought, but denied it, for by the
sun's favour I hoped to see my father that night, and hail Apollo
joyfully in the morning; a hope that grew with exercise of my limbs.
Beautiful cascades of dark bright water leaped down the gorge; we chased
an invisible animal. Suddenly one of us exclaimed, 'We 're in a German
forest'; and we remembered grim tales of these forests, their awful
castles, barons, knights, ladies, long-bearded dwarfs, gnomes and thin
people. I commenced a legend off-hand.

'No, no,' said Temple, as if curdling; 'let's call this place the mouth
of Hades. Greek things don't make you feel funny.'

I laughed 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 crammed the captain about our knowledge.'

'No. I'm glad of it,' said I.

Temple pursued, 'Whatever happens to a fellow, he can meet anything so
long as 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 commit a murder.
But if he didn't, can't he walk through an old castle without meeting
ghosts? 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'm long and high as my shoulder.
One day he met the loveliest girl in the whole country, and she promised
to marry him in twenty years' time, in return for a sack of jewels worth
all Germany and half England.