Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://archive.org/details/kingofmountains00abou THE KING OF THE MOUNTAINS by EDMUND ABOUT. Translated from the French by Mrs. C. A. Kingsbury. Chicago and New York: Rand, McNally & Company. MDCCCXCVII. Copyright, 1897, by Rand, McNally & Co. THE KING OF THE MOUNTAINS. I. HERMANN SCHULTZ. On the 3d of July, about six o'clock in the morning, I was watering my flowers. A young man entered the garden. He was blonde, beardless; he wore a German cap and sported gold spectacles. A long, loose woolen coat, or paletot, drooped in a melancholy way around his form, like a sail around a mast in a calm. He wore no gloves; his tan leather shoes had such large soles, that the foot was surrounded by a narrow flange. In the breast-pocket of his paletot, a huge porcelain pipe bulged half-way out. I did not stop to ask myself whether this young man was a student in the German Universities; I put down my watering-pot, and saluted him with: "Guten Morgen!" "Monsieur," he said to me in French, but with a deplorable accent, "my name is Hermann Schultz; I have come to pass some months in Greece, and I have carried your book with me everywhere." This praise penetrated my heart with sweet joy; the stranger's voice seemed more melodious than Mozart's music, and I directed toward his gold glasses a swift look of gratitude. You would scarcely believe, dear reader, how much we love those who have taken the trouble to decipher our jargon. As for me, if I have ever sighed to be rich, it is in order to assure an income to all those who have read my works. I took him by the hand, this excellent young man. I seated him beside me on the garden-bench. He told me that he was a botanist, that he had a commission from the "Jardin des Plantes" in Hamburg. In order to complete his herbarium he was studying the country, the animals, and the people. His naive descriptions, his terse but just decisions, recalled to me, a little, the simple old Herodotus. He expressed himself awkwardly, but with a candor which inspired confidence; he emphasized his words with the tone of a man entirely convinced. He questioned me, if not of every one in Athens, at least of all the principal personages in my book. In the course of the conversation, he made some statements on general subjects, which seemed to me far more reasonable than any which I had advanced. At the end of an hour we had become good friends. I do not know which of us first spoke of brigandage. People who travel in Italy talk of paintings; those who visit England talk of manufactures; each country has its specialty. "My dear sir," I asked of my guest, "have you met any brigands? Is it true, as is reported, that there are still bandits in Greece?"