at).

I don't know whether all nightingales do this, or if it is peculiar
to this particular spot. When they have sung it once, they clear their
throats a little, and hesitate, and then do it again, and it is the
prettiest little song in the world. How could I indulge my passion for
these drives with their pauses without Peter? He is so used to them that
he stops now at the right moment without having to be told, and he is
ready to drive me all night if I wish it, with no sign of anything but
cheerful willingness on his nice old face. The Man of Wrath deplores
these eccentric tastes, as he calls them, of mine; but has given up
trying to prevent my indulging them because, while he is deploring in
one part of the house, I have slipped out at a door in the other, and am
gone before he can catch me, and have reached and am lost in the shadows
of the forest by the time he has discovered that I am nowhere to be
found.

The brightness of Peter's perfections are sullied however by one spot,
and that is, that as age creeps upon him, he not only cannot hold
the horses in if they don't want to be held in, but he goes to sleep
sometimes on his box if I have him out too soon after lunch, and has
upset me twice within the last year--once last winter out of a sleigh,
and once this summer, when the horses shied at a bicycle, and bolted
into the ditch on one side of the chaussee (German for high road), and
the bicycle was so terrified at the horses shying that it shied too
into the ditch on the other side, and the carriage was smashed, and the
bicycle was smashed, and we were all very unhappy, except Peter, who
never lost his pleasant smile, and looked so placid that my tongue clave
to the roof of my mouth when I tried to make it scold him.

"But I should think he ought to have been thoroughly scolded on an
occasion like that," said Minora, to whom I had been telling this story
as we wandered on the yellow sands while the horses were being put in
the sleigh; and she glanced nervously up at Peter, whose mild head was
visible between the bushes above us. "Shall we get home before dark?"
she asked.

The sun had altogether disappeared behind the pines and only the very
highest of the little clouds were still pink; out at sea the mists
were creeping up, and the sails of the fishing-smacks had turned a dull
brown; a flight of wild geese passed across the disc of the moon with
loud cacklings.

"Before dark?" echoed Irais, "I should think