Our roads, unfortunately, were different. He was bound to Alexisbad on the southern edge of the Hartz, while I was for a visit to His Phantomship, the Spectre of the Brocken. So we parted, with mutual wishes of good luck, and I plunged into the grand mountain defile in front of Herzberg, my knapsack heavier by a loaf of bread. Thenceforward my way was solitude itself. The steeps on either side were clothed to the summit with woods of black pine, with here and there a single larch, of a pale and misty green, like the ghost of a tree. The brawling river ran over cold black rocks, and even where the hills left a little eddy of meadow between them, the winter floods swept it bare and prevented the peasant from planting his scanty harvest. The only houses were those of the woodmen and mountain herdsmen—the only sounds of human life the stroke of axes among the pines and the shout of men and boys driving their cattle up to the cleared places, which were already covered with thick grass. Snow-drifts still lay in the clefts of the rocks and under the boughs of trees which had been felled. Over this stern and lonely region was a dark and lowering sky and the only things that were truly bright and joyous were the crimson pinks that grew by the wayside. I overtook a herdsman with his two boys driving their cows and goats up the valley, and we walked some time in company. With a frank curiosity he asked me why I traveled alone in the Hartz. It was too early, he said, to climb the Brocken, and then nobody went there without company. People said there were still spirits and witches among the hills, and I might easily lose the path and wander about till after night-fall, when I would be in their power. The boys listened to his warnings with perfect belief in their faces. I asked them if they had ever seen those witches, “No,” they answered, but they had never been further than Andreasberg; yet the miners had told them of kobolds who guard the veins of ore and smothered them to death when they came too near their dwellings. The old herdsman said he had climbed the Brocken many years before, in the summer time, and added, “but we took good care to come down again before night.” I promised him to be careful about the road and not to be belated when the witches were abroad, but he still seemed unwilling that I should go alone. “Here are the cattle to take care of,” said he, “but Ernest and Gottlieb could do that; if it were not for the wood I must cut, I would go with you myself the whole way.” If my purse had been a little heavier, I would have paid him for the lost work, and taken him along. This I could not do, and when he reached the path which led to his pasturage, I shook hands with him and repeated my promises. “I hope you may be lucky,” was the last he said, “but I wish I could go along.”