ee, was dancing with the cowherd!

CHAPTER VIII

SALZBURG

We had our breakfast the next morning on the same piazza where we had
dined and where the early morning sun gave an entirely new aspect to the
eternal blueness of the Achensee. Oh, you who have seen only Italian
lakes, think not that you know blue when you see it, until you have seen
the Achensee!

"If you would only get back into yourself," said Jimmie, addressing my
absent spirit, "you might help me decide where we shall go next."

"I can't leave here," I replied. "I cannot tear myself away from this
spot."

"It _is_ beautiful," murmured Bee, dreamily, but she murmured dreamily
not so much because of the beauty of the scene as because eating in the
open air that early in the morning always makes her sleepy.

"'Tis not that," I responded. "'Tis because, while some few modest
triumphs have come my way, I think I never achieved one which gave me
such acute physical satisfaction as I underwent last night at my sister
Bee's success as a _premiere danseuse_. Shall I ever forget it? Shall
danger, or sickness, or poverty, or disaster ever blot from my mind that
scene? Jimmie, never again can she scorn us for our sawdust-ring
proclivities, for do you know, _I_ shouldn't be surprised to see her end
her days on the trapeze!"

But if I fondly hoped to make Bee waver in her thorough approval of her
own acts, this cheerful exchange of badinage, where the exchange was all
on my part, undeceived me, for Bee simply looked at me without replying,
so Jimmie uncoiled himself and handed the map to Bee.

"Jimmie has talked nothing but salt mines for a fortnight," said Bee,
finally, "yet by coming here we have left Salzburg behind us."

"Let's go back then," he said. "It isn't far, and it's all through a
beautiful country."

For a wonder, we all agreed to this plan without the usual discussion of
individual tastes which usually follows the most tentative suggestion
on the part of any one of us who has the temerity to leap into the arena
to be worried.

The whole Rhiner family, including the chambermaid, the shipmaster, and
Bee's friend the cowherd, were on the little pier, under some pretext or
other, to see us off, and not only feeling but knowing that we left real
friends behind us, we started on our way to Jenbach, down the same
little cog-wheel road up which we had climbed, and, as Jimmie said:
"literally getting back to earth again," for the descent was l