"'The next day--and we had prayed the Lord to give us good weather for it--we were to go to a place in the midst of the lonely heath, called Tiefenthal."' "What does that mean?" Maggie interrupted. "_Tief_ means deep. _Thal_ means valley." "'Deep valley,'" said Maggie. "But I do not understand what a _heath_ is." "Naturally. We do not have them in this country, that ever I heard of," said Meredith. "Neither here nor in England," said Mr. Murray. "For miles and miles the Lüneburger heath is an ocean of purple bloom; that is, in the time when the heather is in blossom. But there are woods also in places, and in other places lovely valleys break the spread of the purple heather, where grass and trees and running water make lovely pictures. Sometimes one comes to a hill covered with trees; and here and there you find solitary houses and bits of farms, but scattered apart from each other, so that great tracts of the heath are perfectly lonely and still. You see nothing and hear nothing living, except perhaps some lapwings in the air, and a lizard now and then, and humming beetles, and maybe here and there some frogs where there happens to be a wet place, and perhaps a landrail; elsewhere a general, soft, confused humming and buzzing of creatures that you cannot see, and the purple waves of heather, only interrupted here and there by a group of firs or a growth of bushes along the edge of a ditch." "O Uncle Eden!" cried Maggie, "have you been there? And do you know the village, too?" "_The_ village? Pastor Harms's village--do you mean, Hermannsburg? Yes. It is like many others. Two long lines of cottages, the little river Oerze cutting it in two, beautiful old trees shading it,--that is the village. The cottages are not near each other; gardens and fields lie between; and at the gable of every house is a wooden horse or horse's head; from the old Saxon times, you know. No dirt and no squalor and no beggars nor misery to be seen in Hermannsburg. That, I suppose, is much owing to Pastor Harms's influence." "Thank you, Uncle Eden," said Maggie with a sigh of intense interest. "Now you can go on, Ditto. They were going out into the heath. All the people?"