se; but the question of
luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim, is one of the rocks on which
my plans have been shipwrecked, and the other is the certain censure of
relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, and having no taste for
noonday naps under hedges, would be sure to paralyse my plans before
they had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their cry, "How very
unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!" The relative of five
hundred years back would simply have said, "How holy!"

My father had the same liking for pilgrimages--indeed, it is evident
that I have it from him--and he encouraged it in me when I was little,
taking me with him on his pious journeys to places he had lived in as a
boy. Often have we been together to the school he was at in Brandenburg,
and spent pleasant days wandering about the old town on the edge of one
of those lakes that lie in a chain in that wide green plain; and often
have we been in Potsdam, where he was quartered as a lieutenant, the
Potsdam pilgrimage including hours in the woods around and in the
gardens of Sans Souci, with the second volume of Carlyle's Frederick
under my father's arm; and often did we spend long summer days at the
house in the Mark, at the head of the same blue chain of lakes, where
his mother spent her young years, and where, though it belonged to
cousins, like everything else that was worth having, we could wander
about as we chose, for it was empty, and sit in the deep windows of
rooms where there was no furniture, and the painted Venuses and cupids
on the ceiling still smiled irrelevantly and stretched their futile
wreaths above the emptiness beneath. And while we sat and rested, my
father told me, as my grandmother had a hundred times told him, all that
had happened in those rooms in the far-off days when people danced
and sang and laughed through life, and nobody seemed ever to be old or
sorry.

There was, and still is, an inn within a stone's throw of the great iron
gates, with two very old lime trees in front of it, where we used to
lunch on our arrival at a little table spread with a red and blue check
cloth, the lime blossoms dropping into our soup, and the bees humming in
the scented shadows overhead. I have a picture of the house by my side
as I write, done from the lake in old times, with a boat full of ladies
in hoops and powder in the foreground, and a youth playing a guitar. The
pilgrimages to this place were those I loved the be