Besides this readiness to combine, another favourable aspect of this Communistic society was especially striking to one fresh from among the somewhat churlish, close-fisted Nether-Saxons. This was a certain geniality, an open-handed readiness of good cheer, whether of homely apples or homelier wine. Nothing here of that jealous attitude towards strangers so characteristic of your peasant-farmer or petty ‘_Eigenthümer_.’ You have only to muster up unabashed intrusiveness enough, and you may spy out the land and all the ins and outs of a Granitza dwelling-house without let or hindrance. You may rove at your sweet will through yard and garden, take stock of horned and feathered, seat yourself on the three-legged stool before the culinary hearth—and pray do not let false delicacy or closed doors deter you from unclewing the inmost mysteries of the bed-chamber! The inmates are only too proud to see a visitor. A comfortable sense of co-partnership grows upon you. You find yourself arguing some _post-liminal_ right of adoption as you cross the threshold, and end by asking yourself whether after all there can be any gulf ’twixt _meum_ and _tuum_ when every potsherd and goosequill is common property? ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!’ Let this, then, be the motto of the stranger who visits the Granitza homesteads. Obviously new rules of social decorum must be invented for the occasion, and our code was simple—‘Make yourself at home.’ The idea that we could be intruding became really too preposterous; and as for the truly insular notion that a house could be a castle, we laughed it to scorn! We were Communists for the nonce. The _Genius loci_ inspired us. We penetrated without the introduction of a guide into yards and houses; or if we came to larger farms, where the ground-floor of the house is apportioned to cows and the dwelling-rooms of the scansorial part of the family are above, only approachable by external ladders, we hesitated not to effect entrance by escalade, and the inmates were as little taken aback, and received us with as hearty a good-day as if they had been expecting us for weeks. We could not help thinking of the contrast they presented to the people of the same Sclavonic race, and almost the same language, beyond the mountains that fringed the north-western horizon; to the Wends, namely, and Slovenes, of Carinthia and Carniola. For when Goldsmith tells how The rude Carinthian boor Against the houseless stranger shuts his door,