So I softly arose from the bed, wrote a few words of gratitude to Hans for all his kindness, filled my game-bag with the remains of the supper, stuck the note in the neck of a wine-bottle on the table, in the assurance that Hans would not overlook it there, gave a parting nod to the brave fellow who still lay in the same position upon the sofa in which he had fallen asleep two hours before, patted Caro, who wished to accompany me, and signified to him that I could not take him, took my gun, and went out by the same window at which I had entered. CHAPTER XXIII. Food, drink, and sleep had completely restored my old strength, and I was now in a condition to play my part in the game of "robbers and soldiers" more successfully. The following days--there were three or four of them--form a strange episode in the history of my life; so that it often seems to me that I cannot really have lived them, but must have read the whole in some story-book. Yes, after so many years--there are thirty of them now--the remembrance of those days comes before me like some story about the bad boy who lost himself in the woods, and to whom so many uncomfortable things happened there; and yet who drank so much sweet pure air, and bathed in so much golden sunshine, that one would give who knows how many stations in the monotonous turnpike of his orderly life, could he but once experience such romantic suffering and happiness. As if heaven itself was disposed to be good to the bad boy who, whatever his errors, had erred but through youthful folly, and perhaps, all things considered, was not after all so utterly bad, it sent him two or three of the loveliest autumn days for his adventurous flight. The recent rains had cleared the air to a crystalline transparency, so that the remotest distance seemed brought near at hand. A flood of bright but indescribably soft sunlight streamed from the cloudless sky, and penetrated into the inmost recesses of the forest, where from the huge old trees the yellow leaves silently floated down to the others, with which the ground was already strewn. Not a sound was audible in the sunny wilderness except the melancholy chirp of a yellow-hammer in the thicket, or the hoarse cawing of a crow who regarded with disfavor the gun which I was carrying, or the faint cry of cranes that, careless of what was going on below, were winging high in air their proud flight to southern lands.