"The farmhouse stood quite alone, on an unfrequented by-road, in a little angle of the hills. It was not exactly a picturesque building, with its four walls covered with rough plaster and pierced with dozens of small windows, and its enormous red-tiled roof, with those quaint narrow apertures, like half-opened eyes, disclosing a single pane of glass, which do duty as dormers. It stood flush with the road, as German houses are fond of doing; but behind was a large enclosed farmyard, roughly paved with round stones and well walled in. The front door, though rather pretentiously painted and ornamented, with some religious versicle or other written up on the lintel, was not used as a means of entrance or exit. It was, as I afterwards discovered, not only locked and bolted, but actually screwed up on the inside; and the only way of getting into the house was by a side door opening into the courtyard. As the courtyard itself was provided with a heavy gate, you will see that the farmhouse, close to the road though it was, was by no means so easy of ingress or egress as it appeared, supposing, of course, that it was the humour of the inmates to declare a state of siege. I mention these particulars merely by the way: they are common to three houses out of five in this region. "The Birchmores' luggage had, it appeared, already been carried over from the hotel; but a man, in rough peasant's costume, who announced himself as the master of the house, now came out to take charge of my trunk. I was, or fancied myself (as you may have noticed), a quick judge of faces, and this peasant's face failed to commend itself to me. It was at once heavy and gloomy, while a scar at one corner of his mouth caused that feature to twist itself into a perfunctory grimace, grotesquely at variance with his normal expression. In person he was much above the common size, and to judge by the ease with which he slung my heavy trunk over his shoulder, he must have been as strong as Augustus the Stark himself, whose brazen statue domineers over the market-place in Dresden. "'Guten Morgen, Herr Rudolph!' said Slurk, hailing this giant affably. The two seemed to be on some sort of terms of comradeship, having, perhaps, struck up an acquaintance during the previous negotiations for lodgings. I must say they looked to me to be a not ill-matched pair. "We alighted, and were welcomed in with surly courtesy by Herr Rudolph. Kate, confessing to a headache, went at once to her room, whence she did not again emerge; Slurk disappeared into the kitchen regions with the landlord; Mr. Birchmore presently went out for a stroll before dinner: and I, finding myself thrown temporarily on my own resources, decided to make a virtue of my loneliness by writing some letters which had been long owing. I accordingly groped my way up the darksome stone staircase, and so along an eccentric passage to my room.