In process of time they left the soft blue breadth of the lake behind them, and found themselves in the valley leading up to the Feldberg. Grete struck an independent zigzag course up the hill’s side, clambering up rocky slopes, cutting through patches of forest, and so on, until they found themselves on the high mountain-road loading to their destination. Nothing was to be seen of the carriage; and so they went on alone, into the silence of the tall pines, while the valley beneath them gradually grew wider, and the horizon beyond grew more and more distant. Now they were really in the Black Forest of the old romances—not the low-lying districts, where the trees are of modern growth, but up in the rocky wilderness, where the magnificent trunks were encrusted and coated with lichens of immemorial age—where the spongy yellow-green moss, here and there of a dull crimson, would let a man sink to the waist—where the wild profusion of underwood was rank and strong with the heat of the sun and the moisture of innumerable streams trickling down their rocky channels in the hillside—where the yellow light, falling between the splendid stems of the trees, glimmered away down the narrow avenues, and seemed to conjure up strange forms and faces out of the still brushwood and the fantastic grey lichens which hung everywhere around. Several times a cock capercailzie, with two or three hens under his protection, would rise with a prodigious noise and disappear in the green darkness overhead; occasionally a mountain-hare flew past; and Grete, with an inherited interest, pointed out to her friend the tiny footmarks of the deer on the sand of the rough and winding road. "See, mademoiselle, there is Aenchen Baumer’s house." They had come to an opening in the pines which revealed the broad yellow valley beneath, with its sunlit road running like a thread of silk through it. Grete’s friend’s house was a little white building, with green casements, and a few vines growing up one of the gables; it was separated from the road by a paling which interrupted the long line of rough stone posts which a paternal government had stuck in the ground to prevent carriages tumbling still farther down into the bed of the hollow. "You have come a long way out of your road, Grete," said Miss Brunel. "I came to accompany you, mademoiselle. I can easily go back to Aenchen’s house before the evening." The upward road now grew more and more jagged, rough, and full of mud-holes, until, at last, they left the forest region altogether, and got into the high pasture districts of the mountain. Finally, as the path became a track, grass-grown and rocky, they arrived at a square grey building, with a small garden attached, which stood on the summit of the shoulder of the hill. "It is the Feldberg Inn," said Grete. "Is it pleasant to live on the top of the mountain?" asked her companion.