the world—while he stood there defiant and unchangeably grim. There on the right hand of the square is a more modern safety-guard, and one more in consonance with the advanced civilisation which has arisen since the _Heidenthurm_ was built. This latter guardian is the _Wachtstube_, _Wache_, _Hauptwache_, as it is indiscriminately called—the guardhouse, peopled with half a dozen scrubby-looking soldiers, and a couple of lieutenants, with a white mongrel cur, alternately their plaything and their victim during the weary hours of ennui. The _Heidenthurm_ turns its back upon this outcome of a high civilisation and the Christian religion—what has it in common with the _Wachtstube_, or the _Wachtstube_ with it? To the left, more houses: that big clumsy building with the Prussian eagle over the doorway is the _Rathhaus_; therein the Herr Bürgermeister and his belongings live and move and have their being. Filling in the gaps more and more houses, each one a picture, each roof a distracting medley of hills and dales, ups and downs, dormer windows, turrets, chimney-stacks whose irregularity would break the heart of a high-minded architect of modern suburban villas. And here too, last but not least, for those who want accommodation, with mine host bowing and smiling before the door, is that lumbering old structure, the inn of the place—the _Gasthof zum Herzoglichen Hause_, a building bearing some inexplicable, indefinable, but most indubitable resemblance to Noah’s ark, as pictured to the popular imagination in the toyshop windows. Our party had proceeded thus far—that is, to the market square—on their way from the station. The countess and one of her cousins only had taken seats in the carriage which had met them. The men, Sara Ford, and the other Fräulein von Lehnberg had walked. The German ladies went into raptures over the place; it was _reizend_, _entzückend_, and many other superlative expressions of admiration. Sara asked Falkenberg aside: ‘Is it impossible to go into the old _Dom_ and explore Lotte Buff’s house, and these other quaint old places?’ ‘It is, on the contrary, very possible, _mein Fräulein_. But,’ he added in a lower tone, ‘would you care to go with all these people?’ Sara shrugged her shoulders, smiling a little. ‘I see you would not. I will arrange that you have a good view of whatever you wish to see. Meantime, suppose we go on to my house, where lunch will be ready for us, I expect.’ ‘I wonder,’ thought Sara within herself, ‘whether his wife and family are away from home, or whether his wife is just a slave and a _Hausfrau_, as so many of them appear to be.’ The carriage was now driven past the _Hauptwache_, up a street leading out of a corner of the square, on to a breezy upland road, from which there was a fine view over the level fields far below to the left, while on the right there were pleasant-looking fir-clad hills, over which a bracing breeze blew.