ddened woman, and sat
contemplating the blue tips of my fingers while the waiter brought
breakfast, and thought what a pitiful thing it was to have blue finger
tips, instead of rejoicing as I would have done after a ten minutes'
swim in the glorious fact that I was alive at all on such a morning.

The cold tea, cold eggs, and hard rolls did not make me more cheerful. I
sat under the beeches where I had had supper the night before and
shivered in my thickest coat, with the July sun blazing on the water and
striking brilliant colours out of the sails of the passing fisher-boats.
The hotel dog came along the shingle with his tongue out, and lay down
near me in the shade. Visitors from Putbus, arriving in an omnibus for
their morning bathe, passed by fanning themselves with their hats.

The Putbus visitors come down every morning in a sort of waggonette to
bathe and walk back slowly up the hill to dinner. After this exertion
they think they have done enough for their health, and spend the rest of
the day sleeping, or sitting out of doors drinking beer and coffee. I
think this is quite a good way of spending a holiday if you have worked
hard all the rest of the year; and the tourists I saw looked as if they
had. More of them stay at Putbus than at Lauterbach, although it is so
much farther from the sea, because the hotel I was at was slightly
dearer than--I ought rather to say, judging from the guide-book, not
quite so cheap as--the Putbus hotels. I suppose it was less full than it
might be because of this slight difference, or perhaps there was the
slight difference because it was less full--who shall solve such
mysteries? Anyhow the traveller need not be afraid of the bill, for when
I engaged our rooms the waiter was surprised that I refused to put
myself _en pension_, and explained in quite an aggrieved voice that all
the _Herrschaften_ put themselves _en pension_, and he hoped I did not
think five marks a day for everything a too expensive arrangement. I
praised the arrangement as just and excellent, but said that, being a
bird of passage, I would prefer not to make it.

After breakfast I set out to explore the Goor, the lovely beechwood
stretching along the coast from the very doors of the hotel. I started
so briskly down the footpath on the edge of the cliffs in the hope of
getting warm, that tourists who were warm already and were sitting under
the trees gasping, stared at me reproachfully as I hurried past.

The G