taciturn youth. The only subject which moved Vieweg
to eloquence was quinine, out of which his father had made his fortune.
I confess that at that time I knew no more about that admirable
prophylactic than the Queen of Sheba knew about dry-fly fishing, and
had not the faintest idea of how quinine was made. Vieweg, warming to
his subject, explained to me that the cinchona bark was treated with
lime and alcohol, and informed me that his father now obtained the bark
from Java instead of from South America as formerly. He did his utmost
to endeavour to kindle a little enthusiasm in me on the subject of this
valuable febrifuge. When not talking of quinine, he kept silence. This
singular youth was obsessed with a passionate devotion to the lucrative
drug.

The Harz Mountains are pretty without being grand. The far-famed
Brocken is not 4000 ft. high, but rising as these hills do out of the
dead-flat North German plain, the Harz have been glorified and
magnified by a people accustomed to monotonous levels, and are the
setting for innumerable German legends. The Brocken is, of course, the
traditional scene of the "Witches Sabbath" on Walpurgis-Nacht, and many
of the rock-strewn valleys seem to have pleasant traditions of
bloodthirsty ogres and gnomes associated with them. There is no real
climbing in the Harz, easy tracks lead to all the local lions. As is
customary in methodical Germany, signposts direct the pedestrian to
every view and every waterfall, and I need hardly add that if one post
indicates the Aussichtspunkt, a corresponding one will show the way to
the restaurant without which no view in Germany would be complete.
Through rocky defiles and pine-woods, over swelling hills and past
waterfalls, Vieweg and I trudged once a week in sociable silence,
broken only by a few scraps of information from my companion as to the
prospects of that year's crop of cinchona bark, and the varying
wholesale price of that interesting commodity. At times, before a fine
view, Vieweg would make quite a long speech for him: "Du Fritz! Schon
was?" using, of course, the German diminutive to my Christian name,
after which he would gaze on the prospect and relapse into silence, and
dreamy meditations on sulphate of quinine and its possibilities.

I think Vieweg enjoyed these excursions, for on returning to Brunswick
after about four hours' un-broken silence, he would always say on
parting, "Du Fritz! War nicht so ubel;" or, "Fritz, it wasn't s