cooking, and thinks
bathing and sailing agreeable pastimes, could be extremely happy at a
very small cost at Wiek. And when all other pleasures are exhausted he
can hire the _Bertha_ and go to Hiddensee and study sea-birds.

'Thou takest the excellent but unprepossessing Gertrud with thee?'
inquired the Professor in a slightly displeased voice, seeing her
immovable and the sails being hoisted.

'Yes. I don't like being sick without her.'

'Sick! There will hardly be a sufficiency of wind for the needs of the
vessel--how wilt thou be sick in a calm?'

'How can I tell till I have tried?'

Oh gay voyage down the Wieker Bodden, over the little dancing waves,
under the serene summer sky! Oh blessed change from the creaking of a
carriage through dust to rippling silence and freshness! The Professor
was in such spirits that he could hardly be kept from doing what he
called manning the yards, and had to be fetched down when he began to
clamber by the alarmed skipper. Gertrud sat watching for the first
glimpse of our destination with the intentness of a second Brangaene. The
wind could hardly be said to blow us along, it was so very gentle, but
it did waft us along smoothly and steadily, and Wiek slipped into
distance and its bells into silence, and the occasional solitary farms
on the flat shores slid away one after the other, and the farthest point
ahead came to meet us, dropped astern, became the farthest point behind,
and we were far on our way while we were thinking we could hardly be
moving. The reader who looks at the map will see the course we took, and
how with that gentle wind it came to be nearly twelve before we rounded
the corner of the Wieker Bodden, passed a sandbank crowded with hundreds
of sea-gulls, and headed for the northern end of Hiddensee.

Hiddensee lay stretched out from north to south, long and narrow, like a
lizard lying in the sun. It is absolutely flat, a mere sandbank, except
at the northern end where it swells up into hills and a lighthouse.
There are only two villages on it with inns, the one called Vitte, built
on a strip of sand so low, so level with the sea that it looks as if an
extra big wave, or indeed any wave, must wash right over it and clean it
off the face of the earth; and the other called Kloster, where Charlotte
was.

I observe that on the map Kloster is printed in large letters, as though
it were a place of some importance. It is a very pretty, very small,
handful of fisher