l traveller, and the cutting
wind blows down the street, empty all day long. Certainly a perfect
place to spend a quiet winter in, to go to when one is tired of noise
and bustle and of a world choked to the point of suffocation with
strenuous persons trying to do each other good. Rooms in one of those
spacious old houses with the large windows facing the sun, and plenty of
books--if I were that abstracted but happy form of reptile called a
bookworm, which I believed I am prevented from being only by my sex, the
genus, I am told, being persistently male, I would take care to spend at
least one of my life's winters in Putbus. How divinely quiet it would
be. What a place for him who intends to pass an examination, to write a
book, or who wants the crumples got by crushing together too long with
his fellows to be smoothed out of his soul. And what walks there would
be, to stretch legs and spirits grown stiff, in the crisp wintry woods
where the pale sunshine falls across unspoilt snow. Sitting in my cart
of sorrow in summer sultriness I could feel the ineffable pure cold of
winter strike my face at the mere thought, the ineffable pure cold that
spurs the most languid mind into activity.

Thus far had I got in my reflections, and we had jolted slowly down
about half the length of the street, when a tremendous clatter of hoofs
and wheels coming towards us apparently at a gallop in starkest defiance
of regulations, brought me back with a jerk to the miserable present.

'Bolted,' remarked the surly youth, hastily drawing on one side.

The bath-guests at supper flung down their knives and forks and started
up to look.

'_Halt! Hah!_' cried some of them, '_Es ist verboten! Schritt!
Schritt!_'

'How can he halt?' cried others; 'his horses have bolted.'

'Then why does he beat them?' cried the first.

'It is August!' shrieked Gertrud. 'August! August! We are here! Stop!
Stop!'

For with staring eyes and set mouth August was actually galloping past
us. This time he did hear Gertrud's shriek, acute with anguish, and
pulled the horses on to their haunches. Never have I seen unhappy
coachman with so white a face. He had had, it appeared, the most
stringent private instructions before leaving home to take care of me,
and on the very first day to let me somehow tumble out and lose me! He
was tearing back in the awful conviction that he would find Gertrud and
myself in the form of corpses. 'Thank God!' he cried devoutly on seeing