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At dinner in the evening we had our two guests and a few young fellows from London who did not happen to have their families or homes there. Curiously enough, there was a vast deal of talk about travelling, and also about Baden, and more particularly about the southern districts of Baden. Tita said the Black Forest was the most charming place in the world; and as it was Christmas Day, and as we had been listening to a sermon all about charity and kindness and consideration for others, nobody was rude enough to contradict her. But our forbearance was put to a severe test when, after dinner, she produced a photographic album and handed it round, and challenged everybody to say whether the young lady in the corner was not absolutely lovely. Most of them said that she was certainly very nice-looking; and Tita seemed a little disappointed.

I perceived that it would no longer do to say that Franziska was a pretty girl. We should henceforth have to swear by everything we held dear that she was absolutely lovely.

II. ZUM “GOLDENEN BOCK”

We felt some pity for the lad when we took him abroad with us; but it must be confessed that at first he was not a very desirable travelling companion. There was a gloom about him. Despite the eight months that had elapsed, he professed that his old wound was still open. Tita treated him with the kindest maternal solicitude, which was a great mistake; tonics, not sweets, are required in such cases. Yet he was very grateful, and he said, with a blush, that, in any case, he would not rail against all women because of the badness of one. Indeed, you would not have fancied he had any great grudge against womankind. There were a great many English abroad that autumn, and we met whole batches of pretty girls at every station and at every /table d’hote/ on our route. Did he avoid them, or glare at them savagely, or say hard things of them? Oh no! quite the reverse. He was a little shy at first; and when he saw a party of distressed damsels in a station, with their bewildered father in vain attempting to make himself understood to a porter, he would assist them in a brief and businesslike manner as if it were a duty, lift his cap, and then march off relieved. But by-and-by he began to make acquaintances in the hotel; and as he was a handsome, English-looking lad, who bore a certificate of honesty in his clear gray eyes and easy gait, he was rather made much of. Nor could any fault be decently found with his appetite.

So we passed on from Konigswinter to Coblenz, and from Coblenz to Heidelberg, and from Heidelberg south to Freiburg, where we bade adieu to the last of the towns, and laid hold of a trap with a pair of ancient and angular horses, and plunged into the Hollenthal, the first great gorge of the Black Forest mountains. From one point to another we slowly urged our devious course, walking the most of the day, indeed, and putting the trap and ourselves up for the night at some quaint roadside hostelry, where we ate of roe-deer and drank of Affenthaler, and endeavoured to speak German with a pure Waldshut accent. And then, one evening, when the last rays of the sun were shining along the hills and touching the stems of the tall pines, we drove into a narrow valley and caught sight of a large brown building of wood, with projecting eaves and quaint windows, that stood close by the forest.

“Here is my dear inn!” cried Tita, with a great glow of delight and affection in her face. “Here is /mein gutes Thal! Ich gruss’ dich ein tausend Mal!/ And here is old Peter come out to see us; and there is Franziska!”