Outside the station a high vehicle drawn by two long-tailed horses, one of which reached a head and neck further than the other, so that when you looked at them sideways and could not see that they both began at the same place it seemed to be perpetually winning a race, was in readiness to take them to Kökensee. "This," said Herr Dremmel, introducing it with a wave of the hand, "is my carriage. And this," he continued, similarly introducing the driver, "is my faithful servant Johann. He has been with me now nearly a year." Ingeborg shook Johann's hand, when he had carefully clambered down over the sacks of kainit that filled the front part of the carriage, very politely. "Do they all stay as long as that?" she murmured to Herr Dremmel. "All? There is but my widow, and she is adjusting her feathers for flight. She will wing her way to some other bachelor nest as soon as my Little One has been inducted." "But does she like that?" asked Ingeborg. For she had acquired a habit, due to much repetition of the Litany, of regarding widowers as brittle, needing special care. There was an instant's vision before her eyes of this one flapping blackly athwart the fields of East Prussia, turned out, desolate and oppressed, and with perhaps some cackling trail of curses stridulously marking her course. "No doubt she will feel it. She, too, has been very faithful. She has been with me now nearly eight months. But if it were less she would still feel it. Widows," he continued abstractedly, peering among the sacks of kainit in search of some Chilisaltpetre that was not there, "are in a constant condition of feeling." Johann explained--he was a shabby man, grown grey and frayed, Ingeborg supposed, in service--that the previous stuff did not seem to have caught its train, and Herr Dremmel went off to make anxious inquiries of the stationmaster while Ingeborg stood smiling with an excessive friendliness at Johann to make up for her want of words, and wondering how her luggage would get on to a carriage already so much occupied by sacks. In the end most of it did not and was left at the station till some future time, and clutching her dressing-bag with one hand and the iron rail of the carriage with the other she was rattled away over the enormous cobbles of Meuk with a great cracking of Johann's whip and barking of dogs and kickings of the horses, whose tails were long and kept on getting over the reins. The planks of the carriage's bottom heaved and yawned beneath her feet. The horses shied in and out of the gutters. Her hat wanted to blow off, and she did not dare let either of her hands go free to hold it. She bent her head to try to keep it on. Her skin pricked and tingled from the shaking. She had an impression of red houses flush with the street, railless dwellings giving straight on to it; of a small shop or two; of people stopping to stare; of straw and paper and dust dancing together in the wind.