tly even a single farm like this is a small State in itself,
complete and rounded off, and the lord of it is just as much a king in
his small domain as a real king on a throne.

My host is a splendid old fellow. He is called Justice, although he
certainly has another name too; for that name, you see, has reference
only to the ownership of his property. I hear, however, that this is the
custom around here everywhere. For the most part only the estate has a
name--the name of the owner sinks in that of the property; hence the
earth-born, tough and enduring character of the people here. My Justice
is a man of some sixty-odd years perhaps, but he carries a strong,
large, rugged body, as yet unbent by age. In his reddish-yellow face is
deposited the solar heat of the fifty harvests he has gathered in, his
large nose stands out on his face like a tower, and his white, bristly
eyebrows hang out over his glistening, blue eyes like a straw roof. He
reminds me of a patriarch, who erects a monument of unhewn stones to the
god of his ancestors and pours libations and oil upon it, rears his
colts, cuts his corn, and at the same time judges and rules his people
with unlimited authority. I have never come across a more compact
mixture of venerability and cunning, reason and obstinacy; he is a
genuine, old-time, free peasant in the full sense of the word. I believe
that this is the only place where people of this kind are still to be
found, here where precisely this living apart and this stubbornness
peculiar to the ancient Saxons, combined with the absence of large
cities, has perpetuated the original character of Germania. All
governments and powers have merely skimmed over the surface here; they
have perhaps been able to break off the tops of the various growths, but
not to destroy their roots, from which fresh shoots have ever sprouted
up again, even though they may no longer close together into leafy
crowns.

The region is not at all what one would call beautiful, for it consists
solely of billowy risings and fallings of the ground, and only in the
distance does one see the mountains; furthermore, the latter look more
like a dark hill-slope than a beautifully outlined mountain-range. But
just this absence of pretension, the fact that the mountains do not seem
to place themselves in dress parade directly in front of one's eyes and
say: "How do you like me?" but rather, like a dutiful stewardess, to
serve the tilth of human hands ev