his spoon at the
landlord, who shrugged his shoulders.

"What! you don't call it splendid!"

"As you please," said the landlord, obviously scorning us.

"Such a beautiful walk," said Fraulein Elsa, making a free gift of her
most charming smile to the landlady.

"I never walk," said the landlady; "when I go to Mindelbau my man drives
me--I've more important things to do with my legs than walk them through
the dust!"

"I like these people," confessed Herr Langen to me. "I like them very,
very much. I think I shall take a room here for the whole summer."

"Why?"

"Oh, because they live close to the earth, and therefore despise it."

He pushed away his bowl of sour milk and lit a cigarette. We ate,
solidly and seriously, until those seven and a half kilometres to
Mindelbau stretched before us like an eternity. Even Karl's activity
became so full fed that he lay on the ground and removed his leather
waistbelt. Elsa suddenly leaned over to Fritz and whispered, who on
hearing her to the end and asking her if she loved him, got up and made
a little speech.

"We--we wish to celebrate our betrothal by--by--asking you all to drive
back with us in the landlord's cart--if--it will hold us!"

"Oh, what a beautiful, noble idea!" said Frau Kellermann, heaving a sigh
of relief that audibly burst two hooks.

"It is my little gift," said Elsa to the Advanced Lady, who by virtue of
three portions almost wept tears of gratitude.

Squeezed into the peasant cart and driven by the landlord, who showed
his contempt for mother earth by spitting savagely every now and again,
we jolted home again, and the nearer we came to Mindelbau the more we
loved it and one another.

"We must have many excursions like this," said Herr Erchardt to me, "for
one surely gets to know a person in the simple surroundings of the open
air--one SHARES the same joys--one feels friendship. What is it your
Shakespeare says? One moment, I have it. The friends thou hast, and
their adoption tried--grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel!"

"But," said I, feeling very friendly towards him, "the bother about my
soul is that it refuses to grapple anybody at all--and I am sure that
the dead weight of a friend whose adoption it had tried would kill it
immediately. Never yet has it shown the slightest sign of a hoop!"

He bumped against my knees and excused himself and the cart.

"My dear little lady, you must not take the quotation literally.
Naturally, on