re he sent it home in a cab.

CHAPTER XXIII

SUMMER RESORTS

If you choose to leave the railroad you may still travel by diligence
in Germany, and rumble along the roads in its stuffy interior. As you
pass through a village the driver blows his horn, old and young run
out to enjoy the sensation of the day, the geese cackle and flutter
from you in the dust, you catch glimpses of a cobble-stoned
market-place, a square church-tower with a stork's nest on its summit,
Noah's Ark-like houses with thatched or gabled roofs, tumble-down
balconies, and outside staircases of wood. Sometimes when the official
coach is crowded you may have an open carriage given you without extra
charge, but you cannot expect that to happen often; nor will you often
be driven by postillion nowadays. Indeed, for all I know the last one
may have vanished and been replaced by a motor bus. You can take one
to a mountain inn in the Black Forest nowadays, over a pass I
travelled a few years ago in a mail coach. In those times it was a
jog-trot journey occupying the long lazy hours of a summer morning. I
suppose that now you whizz and hustle through the lovely forest
scenery pursued by clouds of dust and offended by the fumes of petrol,
but no doubt you get to your destination quicker than you used. The
pleasantest way to travel in Germany, if you are young and strong, is
on your feet. It is enchanting to walk day after day through the cool
scented forest and sleep at night in one of the clean country inns.
You must choose your district and your inn, for if you went right off
the traveller's track and came to a peasant's house you would find
nothing approaching the civilisation of an English farmhouse. But in
most of the beautiful country districts of Germany there are fine
inns, and there are invariably good roads leading to them. This way of
travelling is too tame for English people as a rule. They laugh at the
broad well-made path winding up the side of a German mountain, and
still more at the hotel or restaurant to be found at the top. From the
English point of view a walk of this kind is too tame and easy either
for health or pleasure. But the beauty of it, especially in early
summer, can never be forgotten; and so it is worth while, even if you
are young and cherish a proper scorn for broad roads and good dinners.
You would probably come across some dinners that were not good, tough
veal, for instance, and greasy vegetables. The roads you