e from a warm, dry home
where I was appreciated, and had brought me first to the damp tree in
the damp field, and when I had finished my lunch and dessert of cold
pears, was going to drag me into the midst of a circle of unprepared and
astonished cousins. Vast sheep loomed through the mist a few yards off.
The sheep dog kept up a perpetual, irritating yap. In the fog I could
hardly tell where I was, though I knew I must have played there a
hundred times as a child. After the fashion of woman directly she is
not perfectly warm and perfectly comfortable, I began to consider the
uncertainty of human life, and to shake my head in gloomy approval as
lugubrious lines of pessimistic poetry suggested themselves to my mind.

Now it is clearly a desirable plan, if you want to do anything, to do
it in the way consecrated by custom, more especially if you are a woman.
The rattle of a carriage along the road just behind me, and the fact
that I started and turned suddenly hot, drove this truth home to my
soul. The mist hid me, and the carriage, no doubt full of cousins, drove
on in the direction of the house; but what an absurd position I was in!
Suppose the kindly mist had lifted, and revealed me lunching in the
wet on their property, the cousin of the short and lofty letters, the
unangenehme Elisabeth! "Die war doch immer verdreht," I could imagine
them hastily muttering to each other, before advancing wreathed in
welcoming smiles. It gave me a great shock, this narrow escape, and I
got on to my feet quickly, and burying the remains of my lunch under the
gigantic molehill on which I had been sitting, asked myself nervously
what I proposed to do next. Should I walk back to the village, go to the
Gasthof, write a letter craving permission to call on my cousins, and
wait there till an answer came? It would be a discreet and sober course
to pursue; the next best thing to having written before leaving home.
But the Gasthof of a north German village is a dreadful place, and the
remembrance of one in which I had taken refuge once from a thunderstorm
was still so vivid that nature itself cried out against this plan. The
mist, if anything, was growing denser. I knew every path and gate in the
place. What if I gave up all hope of seeing the house, and went through
the little door in the wall at the bottom of the garden, and confined
myself for this once to that? In such weather I would be able to wander
round as I pleased, without the least r