As they both arose a little mishap came to light, which brought upon the Meister something of a scolding. Through his carelessness a flask of fragrant essence had come open, and had poured its contents unobserved over their garments and over the cushioned interior of the chaise. “I might have known it,” lamented Frau Constanze; “there was such a sweet odour all the time! Alack-a-day, a whole flask of pure _Rosée d’aurore_ quite empty! I was so chary of it.” “Ah, little miser,” he comforted her, “take thought, and consider that thus, and thus only, could your divine smelling-whisky do us any good. At first we sat as in an oven, for all your fanning, and then suddenly there was a cool and refreshing atmosphere. You attributed it to the drop or two I poured on my jabot; we were revived, and conversation was once more animated and gay, whereas before our heads had hung low like those of sheep on the butcher’s cart; and this benefit will stay with us for all the rest of the way. But now let us put our Vienna noses into the green wilderness here.” [Illustration: “ARM-IN-ARM THEY ENTERED THE DUSKY SHADE OF THE FIR-TREES.”] Arm-in-arm they scrambled through the trench by the side of the road and entered the dusky shade of the fir-trees. The spicy freshness, the sudden change from the sunny glow without, might have proved disastrous to the reckless man but for the prudence of his companion. She had some trouble in urging his discarded garment upon him. “Ah, the glory of it,” he cried, gazing up the tall trunks; “it is like being in church! Seems to me I never was in the woods before, and it is only now that I can see what this means, this assembly of trees! No man’s hands planted them, they all came of themselves, and stand so only just because it is jolly to live and labour together. Fancy, when I was young I passed this way and that through Europe; I saw the Alps and the ocean, the most beautiful and most sublime things that were ever created; and now here stands the fool in an ordinary forest of firs on the boundary-line of Bohemia, astonished and enraptured that such things should be, that it’s not just _una finzione di poeti_, like the nymphs and fauns and all that, and no stage-forest; no, it’s a genuine one, grown out of the earth, nourished by its moisture and by the warm light of the sun.” “To hear you talk,” said his wife, “one would think you had never gone twenty steps into our Vienna _Prater_, which surely can boast of similar wonders and rarities.” “The _Prater_? Thunder and lightning! How dare you name the word here! What with their carriages, and state uniforms, and toilets and fans, and music, and all horrors under the sun, there’s nothing to be seen beyond. And even the trees, though they are big enough to be sure, I don’t know how it is--beech-nuts and acorns lying on the ground can’t for the life of them help looking like brothers and sisters to the hosts of worn-out corks among them. For miles it smells of waiters and sauces.”