rooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land;
brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armour, in
that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear! This
is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should
carry about with him incongruous memories. There is no foreign land; it
is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of
recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.

But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been
transacted in the bar. Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again
crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship's kettles had changed
hands. If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar's motives, if I had
ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings,
now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must
have been allayed. I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor
how often we drove off merely to drive back again and renew interrupted
conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left
behind. Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a
sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.

Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the
picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an
age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny
and I had not been faint with hunger. The ladies each narrated the story
of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of
sentiment and financial bathos. Abramina, specially, endeared herself
with every word. She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that
should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer. One
touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over. When her
"old man" wrote home for her from America, her old man's family would
not entrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound
herself by an oath--on her knees, I think she said--not to employ it
otherwise. This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me
fully more.

Mrs. Guele told of her homesickness up here in the long winters; of her
honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the
bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her
cheque, should deny all knowledge of it--a fear I have myself every
time I go to a bank; and how cros