m sight to sight in the rain, and
promiscuous cakes instead of the more satisfactory but less cheap meals
Letty called square, she had successfully defended herself from being,
as she put it, fleeced.

To Miss Leech, it was merely a place where your feet get wet, and your
clothes are spoilt.

Early the next morning they started for Kleinwalde.

CHAPTER V

Stralsund is an old town of gabled houses, ancient churches, and quaint,
roughly paved streets, forming an island, and joined to the mainland by
dikes. It looks its best in the early summer, when the green and marshy
plains on whose edge it stands are strewn with kingcups, and the little
white clouds hang over them almost motionless, and the cattle are out,
and the larks sing, and the orange and red sails of the fishing-smacks
on the narrow belt of sea that divides the town from the island of Ruegen
make brilliant points of contrasting colour between the blue of water
and sky. There is a divine freshness and brightness about the
surrounding stretches of coarse grass and common flowers at that blest
season of the year. The air is full of the smell of the sea. The sun
beats down fiercely on plain and city. The people come out of the rooms
in which most of their life is spent, and stand in the doorways and
remark on the heat. An occasional heavy cart bumps over the stones,
heard in that sleepy place for several minutes before and after its
passing. There is an honest, tarry, fishy smell everywhere; and the
traveller of poetic temperament in search of the picturesque, and not
too nice about his comforts, could not fail, visiting it for the first
time in the month of June, to be wholly delighted that he had come.

But in winter, and especially in those doubly gloomy days at the end of
winter, when spring ought to have shown some signs of its approach and
has not done so, those days of howling winds and driving rain and
frequent belated snowstorms, this plain is merely a bleak expanse of
dreariness, with a forlorn old town huddling in its farthest corner.

It was at its very bleakest and dreariest on the morning that Susie and
her three companions travelled across it. "What a place!" exclaimed
Susie, as mile after mile was traversed, and there was still the same
succession of flat ploughed fields, marshes, and ploughed fields again,
with a rare group of furiously swaying pine trees or of silver birches
bent double before the wind. "What a part of the world to c