em, showing how
high was the officer and how low the soldier who might not even pay his
arrogant superior the tribute of a salute without permission.

This knowledge was to serve Tom in good stead before many days should
pass.

CHAPTER XXV

TOM IN WONDERLAND

All through that night, with their compass as a guide, they climbed the
hills, keeping in a southerly direction, but verging slightly eastward.
In the morning they found themselves on the edge of a high, deeply
wooded plateau, which they knew extended with more or less uniformity to
the Swiss frontier.

Looking ahead of them, in a southerly direction, they could see dim,
solemn aisles of sombre fir trees and the ground was like a brown velvet
carpet, yielding gently under their feet. The air was laden with a
pungent odor, accentuated by the recent storm, and the damp, resiny
fragrance was like a bracing tonic to the fugitives, bidding them
welcome to these silent, unfrequented depths.

They were now, indeed, within the precincts of the renowned Schwarzwald,
whose wilderness toyland sends forth out of its sequestered hamlets (or
did) wooden lions, tigers and rhinoceroses for the whole world, and
monkeys on sticks and jumping-jacks and little wooden villages, like the
little wooden villages where they are made.

The west slopes of this romantic region were abrupt, almost like the
Palisades of the Hudson, running close to the river in some places, and
in other places descending several miles back from the shore, so that a
panoramic view of southern Alsace was always obtainable from the sharp
edge of this forest workshop of Santa Claus. In the east the plateau
slopes away and peters out in the lowlands, so that, as one might say,
the Black Forest forms a kind of huge natural springboard to afford one
a good running jump across the Rhine into Alsace.

Archer's battered and misused geography had not lied about the
commissary department of this storied wilderness, for the wild grapes
(of which the famous Rhenish wine is made) did indeed grow in "furious
what-d'you-call-'ems" or luxurious profusion if you prefer, upon the
precipitous western slopes.

All that day they tramped southward, meeting not a soul, and feeling
almost as if they were in a church. It seemed altogether grotesque that
Germany, grim, fighting, war-crazy Germany, should own such a peaceful
region as this.

In the course of the day, they helped the prohibition movement, as
Archer sai