oking. 'Shall we leave
August to put up, and get away into the forest and let Gertrud buy some
lunch and bring it to us?' I asked Charlotte. 'Don't you think dinner in
one of these places will be rather horrid?'

'What sort of lunch will Gertrud buy?' inquired Charlotte cautiously.

'Oh bread, and eggs, and fruit, and things. It is enough on a hot day
like this.'

'My dear soul, it is not enough. Surely it is foolish to starve. I'll
come with you if you like, of course, but I see no sense in not being
properly nourished. And we don't know where and when we shall get
another meal.'

So we drove on to the end hotel, from whose terrace we could look down
at the deserted sands and the wonderful colour of the water. August and
the driver of the luggage cart put up. Gertrud retired to a neighbouring
cafe, and we sat and gasped under the glass roof of the verandah of the
hotel while a hot waiter brought us boiling soup.

It is a barbarous custom, this of dining at one o'clock. Under the most
favourable circumstances one o'clock is a difficult hour to manage
profitably to the soul. There is something peculiarly base about it. It
is the hour, I suppose, when the life of the spirit is at its lowest
ebb, and one should be careful not to extinguish it altogether under the
weight of a gigantic menu. I know my spirit fainted utterly away at the
aspect of those plates of steaming soup and at the smell of all the
other things we were going to be given after it. Charlotte ate her soup
calmly and complacently. It did not seem to make her hotter. She also
ate everything else with equal calmness, and remarked that full brains
are never to be found united to an empty stomach.

'But a full stomach is often to be found united to empty brains,' I
replied.

'No one asserted the contrary,' said Charlotte; and took some more
_Rinderbrust_.

I thought that dinner would never be done. The hotel was full, and the
big dining-room was crowded, as well as the verandah where we were.
Everybody talked at once, and the noise was like the noise of the parrot
house at the Zoological Gardens. It looked as if it were an expensive
place; it had parquet floors and flowers on the tables and various other
things I had not yet come across in Ruegen; and when the bill came I
found that it not only looked so but was so. All the more, then, was I
astonished at the numbers of families with many children and the
necessary Fraeulein staying in it. How did they