e and look out into what Whitman calls
the huge and thoughtful night was a comely and sufficient occupation for
the best part of me; and as for the rest, the inferior or domestic part,
the fingers that might have been busy, the tongue that might have
wagged, the superficial bit of brain in daily use for the planning of
trivialities, how good it is that all that should often be idle.

With an impatience that surprised him I refused the waiter's lamp.

THE SECOND DAY

LAUTERBACH AND VILM

A ripe experience of German pillows in country places leads me to urge
the intending traveller to be sure to take his own. The native pillows
are mere bags, in which feathers may have been once. There is no
substance in them at all. They are of a horrid flabbiness. And they
have, of course, the common drawback of all public pillows, they are
haunted by the nightmares of other people. A pillow, it is true, takes
up a great deal of room in one's luggage, but in Ruegen however simply
you dress you are better dressed than the others, so that you need take
hardly any clothes. My hold-all, not a specially big one, really did
hold all I wanted. The pillow filled one side of it, and my bathing
things a great part of the other, and I was away eleven days; yet I am
sure I was admirably clean the whole time, and I defy any one to say my
garments were not both appropriate and irreproachable. Towards the end,
it is true, Gertrud had to mend and brush a good deal, but those are two
of the things she is there for; and it is infinitely better to be
comfortable at night than, by leaving the pillow at home and bringing
dresses in its place, be more impressive by day. And let no one visit
Ruegen who is not of that meek and lowly character that would always
prefer a good pillow to a diversity of raiment, and has no prejudices
about its food.

Having eased my conscience by these hints, which he will find
invaluable, to the traveller, I can now go on to say that except for the
pillow I would have had if I had not brought my own, for the coloured
quilt, for the water to wash with brought in a very small coffee-pot,
and for the breakfast which was as cold and repellent as in some moods
some persons find the world, my experiences of the hotel were pleasing.
It is true that I spent most of the day, as I shall presently relate,
away from it, and it is also true that in the searching light of morning
I saw much that had been hidden: scraps of paper lyi