ile far
beneath us ran a stream, on one bank of which the trees had been for
some distance cleared away, leaving a strip of pasture of the most
vivid green imaginable. And just below where we stood, a goatherd, in
what--thanks possibly to the enchantment of the distance--appeared a
picturesque costume, was slowly making his way along, piping as he went,
and his flock, of some fifteen or twenty goats of every colour and size,
following him according to their own eccentric fashion, some scrambling
on the bits of rock a little way up the ascending ground, others quietly
browsing here and there on their way--the tinkling of their collar-bells
reaching us with a far-away, silvery sound through the still softer and
fainter notes of the pipe. There was something strangely fascinating
about it all--something pathetic in the goatherd's music, simple,
barbaric even as it was, and in the distant, uncertain tinkling, which
impressed us all, and for a moment or two no one spoke.

"What is it that it reminds me of?" said Lutz suddenly. "I seem to have
seen and heard it all before."

"Yes, I know exactly how you mean," I replied. "It is like a dream;" and
as I said so, I walked on again a little in advance of the others with
Lutz and his rider. For I _thought_ I saw a philosophical or metaphysical
dissertation preparing in Herr von Walden's bent brows and general look
of absorption, and somehow, just then, it would have spoilt it all. Lutz
seemed instinctively to understand, for he too for a moment or so was
silent, when suddenly a joyful cry arose.

"Seeberg!" exclaimed several voices; for the first sight of our
temporary destination broke upon the view all at once, as is often
the case in these more or less wooded districts. One travels for hours
together as if in an enchanted land of changeless monotony; trees, trees
everywhere and nothing but trees--one could fancy late in the afternoon
that one was back at the early morning's starting-point--when suddenly
the forest stops, sharply and completely, where the hand of man has
decreed that it should, not by gradual degrees as when things have been
left to the gentler management of nature and time.

So our satisfaction was the greater from not having known the goal of
that day's journey to be so near. We began to allow to each other for
the first time that we were "a _little_ tired," and with far less
hesitation that we were "_very_ hungry." Still we were not a very
dilapidated-loo