of age, with grave good-natured
faces, and were all dressed in the costume made familiar to us by the
Black Forest stories; broad, round-topped black felt hats with the brims
curled up all round; long red waistcoats with large metal buttons, black
alpaca coats with the waists up between the shoulders. There were no
speeches, there was but little talk, there were no frivolities; the
Council filled themselves gradually, steadily, but surely, with beer,
and conducted themselves with sedate decorum, as became men of position,
men of influence, men of manure.

We had a hot afternoon tramp up the valley, along the grassy bank of a
rushing stream of clear water, past farmhouses, water-mills, and no end
of wayside crucifixes and saints and Virgins. These crucifixes, etc.,
are set up in memory of departed friends, by survivors, and are almost
as frequent as telegraph-poles are in other lands.

We followed the carriage-road, and had our usual luck; we traveled under
a beating sun, and always saw the shade leave the shady places before we
could get to them. In all our wanderings we seldom managed to strike
a piece of road at its time for being shady. We had a particularly hot
time of it on that particular afternoon, and with no comfort but what we
could get out of the fact that the peasants at work away up on the steep
mountainsides above our heads were even worse off than we were. By and
by it became impossible to endure the intolerable glare and heat
any longer; so we struck across the ravine and entered the deep cool
twilight of the forest, to hunt for what the guide-book called the "old
road."

We found an old road, and it proved eventually to be the right one,
though we followed it at the time with the conviction that it was the
wrong one. If it was the wrong one there could be no use in hurrying;
therefore we did not hurry, but sat down frequently on the soft moss and
enjoyed the restful quiet and shade of the forest solitudes. There
had been distractions in the carriage-road--school-children, peasants,
wagons, troops of pedestrianizing students from all over Germany--but we
had the old road to ourselves.

Now and then, while we rested, we watched the laborious ant at his work.
I found nothing new in him--certainly nothing to change my opinion of
him. It seems to me that in the matter of intellect the ant must be a
strangely overrated bird. During many summers, now, I have watched him,
when I ought to have been in better