g on him a rapidly-passing discomfort.'

This seemed to me very irresistible. Surely a place that inspired such a
mingling of the lofty and the homely in its guide-books must be well
worth seeing? There was a drought just then going on at home. My eyes
were hot with watching a garden parch browner day by day beneath a sky
of brass. I felt that it only needed a little energy, and in a few hours
I too might be floating among those jelly-fish, in the shadow of the
cliffs of the legend-surrounded island. And even better than being
surrounded by legends those breathless days would it be to have the sea
all round me. Such a sea too! Did I not know it? Did I not know its
singular limpidity? The divineness of its blue where it was deep, the
clearness of its green where it was shallow, lying tideless along its
amber shores? The very words made me thirsty--amber shores; lazy waves
lapping them slowly; vast spaces for the eye to wander over; rocks, and
seaweed, and cool, gorgeous jelly-fish. The very map at the beginning of
the guide-book made me thirsty, the land was so succulently green, the
sea all round so bland a blue. And what a fascinating island it is on
the map--an island of twists and curves and inland seas called Bodden;
of lakes, and woods, and frequent ferries; with lesser islands dotted
about its coasts; with bays innumerable stretching their arms out into
the water; and with one huge forest, evidently magnificent, running
nearly the whole length of the east coast, following its curves, dipping
down to the sea in places, and in others climbing up chalk cliffs to
crown them with the peculiar splendour of beeches.

It does not take me long to make up my mind, still less to cord up my
light bundle, for somebody else does that; and I think it was only two
days after I first found Marianne North and the guide-book that my maid
Gertrud and I got out of a suffocating train into the freshness that
blows round ryefields near the sea, and began our journey into the
unknown.

It was a little wayside station on the line between Berlin and
Stralsund, called Miltzow, a solitary red building on the edge of a
pine-wood, that witnessed the beginning of our tour. The carriage had
been sent on the day before, and round it, on our arrival, stood the
station authorities in an interested group. The stationmaster,
everywhere in Germany an elaborate, Olympic person in white gloves,
actually helped the porter to cord on my hold-all with hi