eath of relief.

"I am glad," he said. "So that's settled. It's really nice of you."

The heat of the day was passing off, and over the sun-bleached plain the
coolness of evening was beginning to steal. Overhead the wind stirred
more resonantly in the pines, and in the bushes birds called to each
other. Presently after, they rose from where they had lain all the
afternoon and strolled along the needled slope to where, through a vista
in the trees, they looked down on the lake and the hamlet that clustered
near it. Down the road that wound through the trees towards it passed
labourers going homeward from their work, with cheerful guttural cries
to each other and a herd of cows sauntered by with bells melodiously
chiming, taking leisurely mouthfuls from the herbage of the wayside.
In the village, lying low in the clear dusk, scattered lights began to
appear, the smoke of evening fires to ascend, and the aromatic odour of
the burning wood strayed towards them up the wind.

Falbe, whose hand lay in the crook of Michael's arm, pointed downwards
to the village that lay there sequestered and rural.

"That's Germany," he said; "it's that which lies at the back of every
German heart. There lie the springs of the Rhine. It's out of that
originally that there came all that Germany stands for, its music, its
poetry, its philosophy, its kultur. All flowed from these quiet uplands.
It was here that the nation began to think and to dream. To dreamt! It's
out of dreams that all has sprung."

He laughed.

"And then next week when we go to Munich, you will find me saying that
this, this Athens of a town, with its museums and its galleries and its
music, is Germany. I shall be right, too. Out of much dreaming comes
the need to make. It is when the artist's head and heart are full of
his dreams that his hands itch for the palette or the piano. Nuremberg!
Cannot we stop a few hours, at least, in Nuremberg, and see the meadow
by the Pegnitz where the Meistersingers held their contest of song and
the wooden, gabled house where Albrecht Durer lived? That will teach you
Germany, too. The bud of their dream was opening then; and what flower,
even in the magnificence of its full-blowing, is so lovely? Albrecht
Durer, with his deep, patient eyes, and his patient hands with their
unerring stroke; or Bach, with the fugue flowing from his brain through
his quick fingers, making stars--stars fixed forever in the heaven
of harmony! Don't tell me