s to write a useful Guide to
Ruegen, one that should point out its best parts and least uncomfortable
inns to any English or American traveller whose energy lands him on its
shores. With every page I write it grows more plain that I shall not
fulfil that intention. What, for instance, have Charlotte and the
bishop's wife of illuminating for the tourist who wants to be shown the
way? As I cannot conscientiously praise the inns I will not give their
names, and what is the use of that to a tourist who wishes to know where
to sleep and dine? I meant to describe the Jagdschloss, and find I only
repeated a ghost story. It is true I said the rolls at the inn there
were hard, but the information was so deeply embedded in superfluities
that no tourist will discover it in time to save him from ordering one.
Still anxious to be of use, I will now tell the traveller that he must
on no account miss going from Binz to Kiekoewer, but that he must go
there on his feet, and not allow himself to be driven over the roots and
stones by the wives of bishops; and that shortly before he reaches
Kiekoewer (Low German for look, or peep over), he will come to four
cross-roads with a sign-post in the middle, and he is to follow the one
to the right, which will lead him to the Schwarze See or Black Lake, and
having got there let him sit down quietly, and take out the volume of
poetry he ought to have in his pocket, and bless God who made this
little lovely hollow on the top of the hills, and drew it round with a
girdle of forest, and filled its reedy curves with white water-lilies,
and set it about with silence, and gave him eyes to see its beauty.

I am afraid I could not have heard Mrs. Harvey-Browne's questions for
quite a long time, for presently I found she had sauntered round this
enchanted spot to the side where Brosy was taking photographs, and I was
sitting alone on the moss looking down through the trees at the lilies,
and listening only to frogs. I looked down between the slender stems of
some silver birches that hung over the water; every now and then a tiny
gust of wind came along and rippled their clear reflections, ruffling up
half of each water-lily leaf, and losing itself somewhere among the
reeds. Then when it had gone, the lily leaves dropped back one after the
other on to the calm water, each with a little thud. On the west side
the lake ends in a reedy marsh, very froggy that afternoon, and starred
with the snowy cotton flower.