isk of being seen by or meeting
any cousins, and it was after all the garden that lay nearest my heart.
What a delight it would be to creep into it unobserved, and revisit all
the corners I so well remembered, and slip out again and get away safely
without any need of explanations, assurances, protestations, displays
of affection, without any need, in a word, of that exhausting form
of conversation, so dear to relations, known as Redensarten! The mist
tempted me. I think if it had been a fine day I would have gone soberly
to the Gasthof and written the conciliatory letter; but the temptation
was too great, it was altogether irresistible, and in ten minutes I had
found the gate, opened it with some difficulty, and was standing with a
beating heart in the garden of my childhood.

Now I wonder whether I shall ever again feel thrills of the same
potency as those that ran through me at that moment. First of all I was
trespassing, which is in itself thrilling; but how much more thrilling
when you are trespassing on what might just as well have been your own
ground, on what actually was for years your own ground, and when you are
in deadly peril of seeing the rightful owners, whom you have never
met, but with whom you have quarrelled, appear round the corner, and
of hearing them remark with an inquiring and awful politeness "I do
not think I have the pleasure--?" Then the place was unchanged. I was
standing in the same mysterious tangle of damp little paths that had
always been just there; they curled away on either side among the
shrubs, with the brown tracks of recent footsteps in the centre of their
green stains, just as they did in my day. The overgrown lilac bushes
still met above my head. The moisture dripped from the same ledge in
the wall on to the sodden leaves beneath, as it had done all through the
afternoons of all those past Novembers. This was the place, this damp
and gloomy tangle, that had specially belonged to me. Nobody ever
came to it, for in winter it was too dreary, and in summer so full of
mosquitoes that only a Backfisch indifferent to spots could have borne
it. But it was a place where I could play unobserved, and where I could
walk up and down uninterrupted for hours, building castles in the
air. There was an unwholesome little arbour in one dark corner, much
frequented by the larger black slug, where I used to pass glorious
afternoons making plans. I was for ever making plans, and if nothing
came of t