ry good way, and it immensely impressed Frau Bornsted to
see me take two Bibles out for a walk,--when I got back about five,
untidy and hot and able to say off a whole psalm in perfect Lutheran
German, I found several high yellow carriages, like the one I was
fetched in on Saturday, in front of the paling, with nosebags and rugs
on the horses, and indoors in the parlour a number of other foresters
and their wives, besides Frau Bornsted's father and mother and younger
sister, and the local doctor and his wife, and the Herr Lehrer, a tall
young man in spectacles who teaches in the village school two miles
away.

I was astonished, for I imagined complete isolation here. Frau
Bornsted says, though, that this only happens on Sundays. They were
sitting round the remnants of coffee and cake, the men smoking and
talking together apart from the women, the women with their
bonnet-strings untied and hanging over their bosoms, of which there
seemed to be many and much, telling each other, while they fanned
themselves with immense handkerchiefs, what they had had for their
Sunday dinner.

I would have slunk away when I heard the noise of voices, and gone
round to the peaceful company of the cow, but Frau Bornsted saw me
coming up the path and called me in.

I went in reluctantly, and on my appearing there was a dead silence,
which would have unnerved me if I hadn't still had my eyes so full of
sunlight that I hardly saw anything in the dark room, and stood there
blinking.

"_Unsere junge Englanderin," said Frau Bornsted, presenting me.
"Schuhlerin von_ Kloster--_grosses Talent_,--" I heard her adding,
handing round the bits of information as though it was cake.

They all said _Ach so_, and _Wirklich_, and somebody asked if I liked
Germany, and I said, still not seeing much, "_Es ist wundervoll_,"
which provoked a murmur of applause, as the newspapers say.

I found I was expected to sit in a corner with Frau Bornsted's sister,
who with the Lehrer and myself, being all of us unmarried, represented
what the others spoke of as _die Jugend_, and that I was to answer
sweetly and modestly any question I was asked by the others, but not to
ask any myself, or indeed not to speak at all unless in the form of
answering. I gathered this from the behaviour of Frau Bornsted's
sister; but I do find it very hard not to be natural, and it's natural
to me, as you know to your cost, don't you, little mother, to ask what
things mean and why.