ary line, Gaudens greeted us.

We halted there for a while. He came up to the carriage, stretched out
his hand, and exclaimed, "Do you know me yet?"

"Certainly I do; you are Gaudens."

"Yes, it is easy to find me; from here around the corner, down to the
Maiengrund is my district. I was in the revolution too, but I lied my
way out. Yes, Ludwig, you have wandered about a great deal in the wide
world. It is best at home, after all; isn't it? Is this your son?"

"It is."

"God bless him. And what a splendid wife you have!--What a pity about
Ernst; he has such a good heart and is such a sensible fellow, and yet
commits such wicked and foolish tricks. All I wish for is to have a
place where I might have some little extra profits from fruit and grass
by the road; nothing ripens here but pine cones."

When Wolfgang shook hands with him at parting, he said, "He has a soft
hand; he cannot swing the pickaxe as you did when you were building
your first road."

"How lovely it is here," said Wolfgang. "Here you know every one, and
every one knows you; you cannot meet a stranger."

He was right; it is so; and this makes a full life, but a hard one too.

We left the forester's house, where the forester's pretty wife, holding
a child on her arm, greeted us. Our way lay along the crest of the
mountain, and looked down into the valley, where the haystacks were
scattered about the meadow, in the hollow, and along the hillside.
Ludwig said:

"Whenever I thought of home, this view of the valley always came back
to me. I was walking here once with Ernst, while he was yet quite a
little fellow, and he said to me, 'Ludwig, look at the haystacks. Don't
they look like a scattered herd of cows on the meadow?'"

He must have noticed that his allusion to Ernst had agitated me, and he
added, "Father, we must be strong enough to think calmly of the dead
and of the lost ones."

When we passed the woods that belonged to Uncle Linker and me, Ludwig
was delighted to find how nicely they had been kept.

He then inquired about Martella, and when I said that she had a strange
aversion to America, and disliked to hear it mentioned, he replied:

"Do you not believe, father, that she has an unexplained, and perhaps
sad, past, which is in some way associated with America?" I was
startled;--the case seemed to present new and puzzling difficulties.

Ludwig was pleased with the meadow-valley where he had arranged the
trench with sluices. In very