My search for dead or living Dreisers, which I have purposely skipped in order to introduce the town, led me first, as I have said, to the local graveyard--the old “Kirchhof.” It was lowering to a rain as I entered, and the clouds hung in rich black masses over the valley below. It was half-after four by my watch. I made up my mind that I would examine the inscription of every tombstone as quickly as possible, in order to locate all the dead Dreisers, and then get down into the town before the night and the rain fell, and locate the live ones--if any. With that idea in view I began at an upper row, near the church, to work down. Time was when the mere wandering in a graveyard after this fashion would have produced the profoundest melancholy in me. It was so in Paris; it made me morbidly weary and ineffably sad. I saw too many great names--Chopin, Balzac, Daudet, Rachel--solemnly chiseled in stone. And I hurried out, finally, quite agonized and unspeakably lonely. Here in Mayen it was a simpler feeling that was gradually coming over me--an amused sentimental interest in the simple lives that had had, too often, their beginning and their end in this little village. It was a lovely afternoon for such a search. Spring was already here in South Germany, that faint, tentative suggestion of budding life; all the wind-blown leaves of the preceding fall were on the ground, but in between them new grass was springing and, one might readily suspect, windflowers and crocuses, the first faint green points of lilies and the pulsing tendrils of harebells. It was beginning to sprinkle, the faintest suggestion of a light rain; and in the west, over the roofs and towers of Mayen, a gleam of sunlight broke through the mass of heavy clouds and touched the valley with one last lingering ray. “_Hier ruht im Gott_” (Here rests in God), or “_Hier sanft ruht_” (Here softly rests), was too often the beginning. I had made my way through the sixth or seventh row from the top, pushing away grass at times from in front of faded inscriptions, rubbing other lichen-covered letters clean with a stick and standing interested before recent tombstones. All smart with a very recently developed local idea of setting a black piece of glass into the gray of the marble and on that lettering the names of the departed in gold! It was to me a very thick-witted, truly Teutonic idea, dull and heavy in its mistakes but certainly it was no worse than the Italian idea of putting the photograph of the late beloved in the head of the slab, behind glass in a stone-cut frame and of further ornamenting the graves with ghastly iron-shafted lamps with globes of yellow, pink and green glass. That was the worst of all.