nding to walk up to the old school that
very evening. It stood in the centre of the community's village, some
four miles distant through the forest, and he now recollected for the
first time that this little Protestant settlement dwelt isolated in a
section of the country that was otherwise Catholic. Crucifixes and
shrines surrounded the clearing like the sentries of a beleaguering
army. Once beyond the square of the village, with its few acres of field
and orchard, the forest crowded up in solid phalanxes, and beyond the
rim of trees began the country that was ruled by the priests of another
faith. He vaguely remembered, too, that the Catholics had showed
sometimes a certain hostility towards the little Protestant oasis that
flourished so quietly and benignly in their midst. He had quite
forgotten this. How trumpery it all seemed now with his wide experience
of life and his knowledge of other countries and the great outside
world. It was like stepping back, not thirty years, but three hundred.

There were only two others besides himself at supper. One of them, a
bearded, middle-aged man in tweeds, sat by himself at the far end, and
Harris kept out of his way because he was English. He feared he might be
in business, possibly even in the silk business, and that he would
perhaps talk on the subject. The other traveller, however, was a
Catholic priest. He was a little man who ate his salad with a knife, yet
so gently that it was almost inoffensive, and it was the sight of "the
cloth" that recalled his memory of the old antagonism. Harris mentioned
by way of conversation the object of his sentimental journey, and the
priest looked up sharply at him with raised eyebrows and an expression
of surprise and suspicion that somehow piqued him. He ascribed it to his
difference of belief.

"Yes," went on the silk merchant, pleased to talk of what his mind was
so full, "and it was a curious experience for an English boy to be
dropped down into a school of a hundred foreigners. I well remember the
loneliness and intolerable Heimweh of it at first." His German was very
fluent.

The priest opposite looked up from his cold veal and potato salad and
smiled. It was a nice face. He explained quietly that he did not belong
here, but was making a tour of the parishes of Wurttemberg and Baden.

"It was a strict life," added Harris. "We English, I remember, used to
call it _Gefaengnisleben_--prison life!"

The face of the other, for some