done
with him, what exultations are, and agonies, and love, and man's
unconquerable mind. He really is very nice. I'm sure you'd like him.

After lunch, and after Kloster had said some more regrettable things,
being much moved, it appeared, by the palace facing him and by some
personal recollections he had of the particular Hohenzollern it
contained, while I lay looking up along the smooth beech-trunks to
their bright leaves glancing against the wonderful blue of the sky--oh
it was so lovely, little mother!--and Frau Kloster sometimes said
_Aber_ Adolf, and occasionally announced that she had slain another
mosquito, we motored on towards Brandenburg, along the chain of lakes
formed by the Havel. It was like heaven after the Lutzowstrasse. And
at four o'clock we stopped at a Gasthaus in the pinewoods and had
coffee and wild strawberries, and Herr von Inster paddled me out on the
Havel in an old punt we found moored among the rushes.

It looked so queer to see an officer in full Sunday splendour punting,
but there are a few things which seem to us ridiculous that Germans do
with great simplicity. It was rather like being punted on the Thames
by somebody in a top hat and a black coat. He looked like a bright
dragon-fly in his lean elegance, balancing on the rotten little board
across the end of the punt; or like Siegfried, made up to date, on his
journey down the Rhine,--made very much up to date, his gorgeous
barbaric boat and fine swaggering body that ate half a sheep at a
sitting and made large love to lusty goddesses wittled away by the
centuries to this old punt being paddled about slowly by a lean man
with thoughtful eyes.

I told him he was like Siegfried in the second act of the
Gotterdammerung, but worn a little thin by the passage of the ages, and
he laughed and said that he at least had got Brunnhilde safe in the
boat with him, and wasn't going to have to climb through fire to fetch
her. He says he thinks Wagner's music and Strauss's intimately
characteristic of modern Germany: the noise, the sugary sentimentality
making the public weep tears of melted sugar, he said, the brutal
glorification of force, the all-conquering swagger, the exaggeration of
emotions, the big gloom. They were the natural expression, he said, of
the phase Germany was passing through, and Strauss is its latest
flowering,--even noisier, even more bloody, of a bigger gloom. In that
immense noise, he said, was all Germany as it i