And so if, in the place where once the Supreme Justice and the heir of the region lived, Nature once more awakens special qualities in a person, there may grow up amid these thousand-year-old memories and between the boundaries and ditches which are, after all, still recognizable, a figure like our Justice, whose right of existence is not acknowledged by the powers of the present, to be sure, but which for its own self, and among its own kind, may temporarily restore a condition which disappeared long ago. Let us look around in the Oberhof itself. If the praise of a friend is always very ambiguous, then surely one may trust the envy of an enemy; and the person most worthy of credit is a horse-dealer, who calls special attention to the comfortable circumstances of a peasant with whom he could not agree in a matter of business. To be sure, one could not say, as the horse-dealer Marx did, that the surroundings reminded one of a count's estate; on the other hand, in whatever direction one looked there was an atmosphere of peasant prosperity and opulence which could not but call out to the hungriest stranger: Here you can eat your fill; the plate is never empty. The estate lay entirely alone on the border of the fertile plain, at the point where it passes over into hilly woodland; indeed, the Justice's last fields lay on a gentle slope, and a mile away were the mountains. The nearest neighbor in the peasant community lived a quarter of an hour away from the estate, around which were spread out all the possessions which a large country household had need of--fields, woods and meadows, all in compact uninterrupted continuity. From the foot of the hills the fields ran down in beautiful order across the plain. It was, moreover, about the time when the rye was in blossom; its exhalation, as a thank-offering of the soil, rose from the spikelets and was wafted aloft on the warm summer breezes. Single rows of high-trunked ashes and knotty elms, planted on either side of the old boundary ditches, inclosed a part of the cornfields, and, being visible from afar, indicated, more definitely than stones and stakes can do, the limits of the inheritance. A deep road ran between dikes of earth diagonally across the fields, branched off into paths at several places on both sides, and led, at the point where the grain ceased, into a vigorous and well-kept oak grove, under which a number of hogs were comfortably imbedded in the soil, the shade of which, however, was equally refreshing to human beings. This grove, which supplied the Justice with wood, extended to within a few paces of the farmhouse and inclosed it on two sides, thus, at the same time, affording it protection against the east and north winds.