been settled
will there be, if ever, raptures. The guide-book's raptures about Baabe
rang hollow. The relief chest-sufferers would find there if they could
be induced to go, and the poem of the embedded one, would not, I felt,
have been put in if there had been anything really solid to praise.
Still, a place in a forest near the sea called _Die Einsame_ was to me,
at least, attractive; and I said good-bye to the Lauterbach I knew and
loved, and started, full of hope, for the Baabe I was all ready to love.

It was a merry day of bright sun and busy breeze. Everything was moving
and glancing and fluttering. I felt cheerful to hilarity when we were
fairly out in the fields that lie between the Greek temple and the
village of Vilmnitz--privately hilarious, of course, for I could not be
openly so in the sober presence of Gertrud. I have observed that sweet
smells, and clear light, and the piping of birds, all the things that
make life lovely have no effect whatever on Gertruds. They apparently
neither smell, nor see, nor hear them. They are not merely unable to
appreciate them, they actually do not know that they are there. This
complete unconsciousness of the presence of beauty is always a wonder to
me. No change of weather changes my Gertrud's settled solemnity. She
wears the same face among the roses of June that she does in the nipping
winds of March. The heart of May, with which every beast keeps holiday,
never occupies her respectable interior. She is not more solemn on a
blank February afternoon, when the world outside in its cold wrapping of
mist shudders through the sodden hours, than she is on such a day of
living radiance as this third one of our journey. The industrious breeze
lifted up the stray hairs from her forehead and gave it little pats and
kisses that seemed audaciously familiar applied to a brow of such
decorum; the restless poplar leaves whispered all the secrets of life in
her unhearing ears; the cottage gardens of Vilmnitz, ablaze that day
with the white flame of lilies, poured their stream of scent into the
road, and the wind caught it up and flung it across her sober nostrils,
and she could not breathe without drawing in the divineness of it, yet
her face wore exactly the same expression that it does when we are
passing pigs. Are the Gertruds of this world, then, unable to
distinguish between pigs and lilies? Do they, as they toss on its
troublesome waves, smell perpetual pigs? The question intereste