n
the great Emperor of the Franks succeeded, by means of fire and sword,
in converting the obstinate inhabitants.

And so if, in the place where once the Supreme Justice and the heir of
the region lived, Nature once more awakens special qualities in a
person, there may grow up amid these thousand-year-old memories and
between the boundaries and ditches which are, after all, still
recognizable, a figure like our Justice, whose right of existence is not
acknowledged by the powers of the present, to be sure, but which for its
own self, and among its own kind, may temporarily restore a condition
which disappeared long ago.

Let us look around in the Oberhof itself. If the praise of a friend is
always very ambiguous, then surely one may trust the envy of an enemy;
and the person most worthy of credit is a horse-dealer, who calls
special attention to the comfortable circumstances of a peasant with
whom he could not agree in a matter of business. To be sure, one could
not say, as the horse-dealer Marx did, that the surroundings reminded
one of a count's estate; on the other hand, in whatever direction one
looked there was an atmosphere of peasant prosperity and opulence which
could not but call out to the hungriest stranger: Here you can eat your
fill; the plate is never empty.

The estate lay entirely alone on the border of the fertile plain, at the
point where it passes over into hilly woodland; indeed, the Justice's
last fields lay on a gentle slope, and a mile away were the mountains.
The nearest neighbor in the peasant community lived a quarter of an hour
away from the estate, around which were spread out all the possessions
which a large country household had need of--fields, woods and meadows,
all in compact uninterrupted continuity.

From the foot of the hills the fields ran down in beautiful order across
the plain. It was, moreover, about the time when the rye was in blossom;
its exhalation, as a thank-offering of the soil, rose from the spikelets
and was wafted aloft on the warm summer breezes. Single rows of
high-trunked ashes and knotty elms, planted on either side of the old
boundary ditches, inclosed a part of the cornfields, and, being visible
from afar, indicated, more definitely than stones and stakes can do, the
limits of the inheritance. A deep road ran between dikes of earth
diagonally across the fields, branched off into paths at several places
on both sides, and led, at the point where the grain cease