lamenting their complete want of common sense.'

'Indeed?'

'How sensible English people are compared to them!'

'Do you think so?'

'Why, of course, in everything.'

'But are you not judging the whole nation by the few?'

'Oh, one can always tell. What could be more supremely senseless for
instance'--and she waved a hand over the bay--'than calling the Baltic
the Ostsee?'

'Well, but why shouldn't they if they want to?'

'But dear Frau X., it is so foolish. East sea? Of what is it the east?
One is always the east of something, but one doesn't talk about it. The
name has no meaning whatever. Now "Baltic" exactly describes it.'

THE SEVENTH DAY

FROM BINZ TO STUBBENKAMMER

We left Binz at ten o'clock the next morning for Sassnitz and
Stubbenkammer. Sassnitz is the principal bathing-place on the island,
and I had meant to stay there a night; but as neither of us liked the
glare of chalk roads and white houses we went on that day to
Stubbenkammer, where everything is in the shade.

Charlotte had not gone away as she said she would, and when I got back
to our lodgings the evening before, penitent and apologetic after my
wanderings in the forest, besides being rather frightened, for I was
afraid I was going to be scolded and was not sure that I did not deserve
it, I found her sitting on the pillared verandah indulgently watching
the sunset sky, with _The Prelude_ lying open on her lap. She did not
ask me where I had been all day; she only pointed to _The Prelude_ and
said, 'This is great rubbish; 'to which I only answered 'Oh?'

Later in the evening I discovered that the reason of her want of
interest in my movements and absence of reproachfulness was that she
herself had had a busy and a successful day. Judgment, hurried on by
Charlotte, had overtaken the erring Hedwig; and the widow, expressing
horror and disgust, had turned her out. Charlotte praised the widow.
'She is an intelligent and a right-minded woman,' she said. 'She assured
me she would rather do all the work herself and be left without a
servant altogether than keep a wicked girl like that. I was prepared to
leave at once if she had not dismissed her then and there.'

Still later in the evening I gathered from certain remarks Charlotte
made that she had lent the most lurid of her works, a pamphlet called
_The Beast of Prey_, to the widow, who to judge from Charlotte's
satisfaction was quite carried away by it. Its nature was certainly
s