n, there comes a soft,
pleasant day, just warm enough to make it agreeable to loiter in the
open air, then the extravagantly crooked path that joins the Allpach
road, just before you leave the last high-lying houses of the town, is
a charming spot. On the serpentine windings of the path as it goes up
the hill the sun always lies warm. The place is sheltered from every
wind. A few gnarled old fruit-trees give not indeed fruit but a little
shade, and the border of the road, a green strip of smooth surf,
entices you in the friendliest way by its soft curves to sit down or to
stretch yourself at full length. The white path gleams in the sunlight
as it climbs slowly and easily, sending a thin cloud of dust up to
greet every farm-wagon or landau or post-chaise; and it gives a view
over a steep huddle of dark roofs, broken here and there by the tops of
trees, down into the heart of the town--to the market-place, which
indeed, seen from here, loses a good deal of its impressiveness, and
appears only as a peculiarly fore-shortened rectangle of irregular
houses and curiously protruding front steps and cellar doors.

On such mild, sunshiny days the comfortable turf border of this lofty
hill-climbing path is always occupied by a small troop of resting men,
whose bold, weather-beaten faces do not entirely harmonize with their
tame and sluggish gestures, and the youngest of whom is well up in the
fifties. They sit or lie at their ease in the warm greenness; they are
silent, or carry on short, muttered conversations; they smoke short
black pipes, and are continually spitting, with an air of contempt for
the world, down the steep slope below them. The few workmen who pass by
are sharply observed by them and critically placed; and each, according
to the verdict, is greeted with a benevolent nod and "How are you,
comrade?" or allowed to pass in disdainful silence.

A stranger who watched the old men lounging there, and inquired in the
first street he came to about the odd collection of gray idlers, could
learn from any child that they were known as the "Sun-Brothers." Many
such strangers turned to look back once more at the weary group
blinking in the sunlight, and wondered how they came to get such a
lofty-sounding and poetical name. Some traveling enthusiasts felt a
mysterious thrill at the name, and made out of the half-dozen gray
loafers the surviving remnants of an almost extinct and very ancient
community of worshippers of the orb