They had now passed through a high wood of under-brush, which teasingly disclosed and hid by turns the landscapes that glided around them, and had come near to the spire which looks in upon the flute-dell, and near which lay a solitary church and Spener's dwelling, and in the plain below the open village. Spener came to meet his pupil--after the manner of old men--unconcerned about the others; and a young roe ran after him. A beautiful spot! Little white peacocks; turtle-doves at large; a city of bees in the midst of their bee-flora,--all bespoke the tranquil old man, whom the earth serves and honors, and who, indifferent towards it, lives only in God. He came--disappointing one's expectation of an ecclesiastical gravity--with a light playfulness upon the gay train, and laid his finger in benediction on the forehead of Liana, who seemed to be his granddaughter, as it were, a second tree-blossom in the late autumn of life. In a daughterly way, she placed the bunch of dwarf-roses in his bosom, and took very careful notice whether it pleased him. She smiled quite serenely, and all her tears seemed fanned away; but she resembled the rain-sprinkled tree, when the sun laughs out again,--the least agitation flings the old rain from the still leaves. The old man was delighted with the sympathy of the young people, and remained with them upon the blooming and resounding eminence, which sat enthroned between a wide landscape and the richly laden mountain-ridge, running away into Elysium. Since, as with one who ascends in a balloon, the tones of earth did not reach him from so great a distance as its forms, they let him talk more than listen, as one spares old people.