When we drove out with my grandfather he was acclaimed by the principal personages of every village we went through. At each village there was a big inn with a rumbling skittle-alley and always a tall Maypole banded like a barber’s pole with blue and white, the Bavarian national colours. The roads were lined with fruit trees. The idea of these unguarded public fruit trees astonished us. We could not understand why there was any fruit left on them. Even the horse-chestnut trees on Wimbledon Common were pelted with sticks and stones, long before the chestnuts were ripe and in defiance of an energetic common keeper. The only things that we could not quite get accustomed to in Bavaria were the wayside crucifixes with the realistic blood and wounds, and the _ex-voto_ pictures, like sign-boards, of naked souls in purgatory, grinning with anguish in the middle of high red and yellow flames. We had been taught to believe in hell, but did not like to be reminded of it. Munich we found sinister—disgusting fumes of beer and cigar smoke and intense sounds of eating, the hotly dressed, enormously stout population in the trams and trains, the ferocious officials, the wanton crowds at the art shops and picture galleries. Then there was the Morgue. We were not allowed inside because we were children, but it was bad enough to be told about it. Any notable who died was taken to the Morgue and put in a chair, sitting in state for a day or two, and if he was a general he had his uniform on, or if she was a burgomaster’s wife she had on her silks and jewels; and strings were tied to their fingers and the slightest movement of one of the strings would ring a great bell, in case there was any life left in the corpse after all. I have never verified the truth of all this, but it was true enough to me. When my grandfather died about a year after our last visit I thought of him there in the Morgue with his bushy white hair, and his morning coat and striped trousers and his decorations and his stethoscope, and perhaps, I thought, his silk hat, gloves, and cane on a table beside the chair. Trying, in a nightmare, to be alive but knowing himself dead.