“Shortly after leaving Erfurt we had our first real adventure. We ran upon a band of armed villains led by a fellow styled a ‘Ritter’ (_i.e._ with some pretence to coat-armor) in the act and article of rifling the wagons of certain Halle merchants who were sadly watching the plundering with their arms strapped behind them. Modesty forbids me to tell of my own feats in combat; nevertheless, Andrea afterward proclaimed that I laid about me like a veritable Orlando. In any case, we dispersed the rascals, rescued the merchants, and I pinked the Ritter through the shoulder. Afterwards when we trussed him up to carry onward to Nordhausen and to summary justice, the fellow professed no sorrow for his misdeeds, but asserted his rights to plunder along that highway. ‘From time immemorial his family had possessed the right to plunder every cart which broke its axle upon the road betwixt certain limits, and assuredly _that_ cart had so broken its axle. Besides, every Ritter now and then made his horse “bite off the purses of travellers.”’ “All this gave me a taste of the country I was entering. From Nordhausen, as I fared northward, the country became ever more wild and rocky. Not sublime like the Alps; not softly sensuous like the south of our dear Italy; but one green hill after another, each a little higher, each a little steeper than its predecessor, until at last you wind in and out the mountains, following the line of some green rushing brook, while high above, the great ridges of pointed pines rise line upon line, like the spear points of a serried army. “So we plunged into the Harz, over hill and dale, past castles and brown-thatched hamlets. Sometimes a red-roofed village, with its peaked parish spire would loom before us; sometimes a little chapel upon a soaring crag. The country folk were haler and brawnier than the lowlanders we were quitting. We met a great flock of black sheep, with a grizzled, blue-coated shepherd, filling all the roadway and crowding us nigh across the wall. We passed five ox-teams pulling great creaking loads of hay, so high that the latter seemed to dwarf both the double yoke and the sturdy driver who was guiding the whole vast mass with a deft touch of his goad. Again there was the melodious tinkling of fifty cow-bells, as the long herd came plodding down the pine-hung way.