heir soup-plates to listen. The
waiter referred me to the head waiter. Embarrassed, I repeated my
wishes, cooled down to the point where they almost cease to be wishes,
to this person, and all the children of Germany sat with their knives
suspended in the air and their mouths open while I did it. The head
waiter told me I could have the rooms on the 15th of August--it was then
the 17th of July--at which date the holidays ended and the families went
home. 'Oh, thank you, thank you; that will do beautifully!' I cried,
only too grateful that the families had left no corner unoccupied into
which I might have felt obliged, by the lateness of the hour, to force
my shrinking limbs; and hurrying to the door I could hear how all the
children of Germany's heads seemed to splash back again into their
soup-plates.

But my pleasure at not being doomed to stay there was foolish, as I
quickly perceived, for stay somewhere I must, and the guide-book was
right when it said this was the best hotel. Outside in the windy street
August and the horses were waiting patiently. The stars were coming out
in the pale green of the sky over Goehren, but from the east the night
was dragging up a great curtain of chill black cloud. For the best part
of an hour Gertrud and I went from one hotel to another, from one
lodging-house to another. The hotels all promised rooms if I would call
again in four weeks' time. The lodging-houses only laughed at our
request for a night's shelter; they said they never took in people who
were not going to stay the entire season, and who did not bring their
own bedding. Their own bedding! What a complication of burdens to lay on
the back of the patient father of a family. Did a holiday-maker with a
wife and, say, four children have to bring six sets of bedding with him?
Six sets of Teutonic bedding, stuffed with feathers? Six pillows, six of
those wedge-like things to put under pillows called _Kielkissen_, and
six quilted coverlets with insides of eider-down if there was a position
to keep up, and of wadding if public opinion could afford to be defied?
Yet the lodging-houses were full; and that there were small children in
them was evident from the frequency with which the sounds that accompany
the act of correction floated out into the street.

We found a room at last in the gloomiest hotel in the place. Only one
room, under the roof in a kind of tower, with eight beds in it, and no
space for anything else. August had