A tramp through the Thuringian highlands, with their deep, black-wooded valleys and glorious hilltops bathed in the cloudless sunshine of early summer, their flower-scented breezes and pine-perfumed woodlands, would convert to pedestrianism the most sedentary of mortals. Laasen was still slate-black, like a village in deep mourning, but the next town, seen far off across a valley in its forest frame, was gay again under the familiar red-tile roofs. With sunset I reached Saalfeld, a considerable city in a broad lowland, boasting a certain grimy industrial progress and long accustomed to batten on tourists. In these untraveled days it was sadly down at heel, and had a grasping disposition that made it far less agreeable than the simple little towns behind that earn their own honest living. Food, of course, was scarce and poor, and, as is always the case, the more one paid for it the more exacting was the demand for tickets. A hawk-faced hostess charged me twice as much for boiling the meat I had brought with me as I had paid for it in Tschirn. Sunday had come again. The cities, therefore, were all but forsaken and my hob-nails echoed resoundingly through the stone-paved streets. Their inhabitants one found miles beyond, “hamstering” the country-side or holidaying with song, dancing, and beer in the little villages higher up among the hills. The habitual tramp, however, was nowhere to be seen; the Great War has driven him from the highways of Europe. An occasional band of gipsies, idling about their little houses on wheels, in some shaded glen, or peering out through their white-curtained windows, were the only fellow-vagabonds I met during all my German tramp. I talked with several of them, but they were unusually wary of tongue, taking me perhaps for a government spy; hence there was no way of knowing whether their fiery-eyed assertion of patriotism was truth or pretense.