The hour of noon, the hour of the great Pan! Not the faintest breath stirred the shining air; motionless were the dazzling white clouds upon the steel blue vault of the heavens; motionless the tops of the trees, the blossoming bushes, even the long blades of grass. Not a sound disturbed the profound stillness; even the locust, which had chirped among the stones of the giant's monument, was silent, perhaps terrified by the brown serpent, which, with its head upraised and its round glittering eyes fixed steadily upon Gotthold, lay motionless upon one of the masses of rock a few paces off, with the rest of its scaly body buried in a dense mass of heather. He had not noticed it before, and now perceived it with a sort of shudder. It seemed as if the torpor into which Nature had sunk had been embodied; as if the spirit of loneliness and desolation had assumed a material form. Woe betide you when the loneliness of yonder mansion with its neglected garden, the desolation of this remote valley, so far away from all human society, stares at you with those cold, cruel eyes; when you listen in the stillness for a beloved voice, and hear only the blood seething in your temples, and the heavy, anxious throbbing of your heart. Avaunt, fiend, avaunt! He raised his staff; the serpent disappeared; when he reached the rock upon which it must have been lying, he could see nothing but the swaying of the flowers through whose closely interwoven roots it was gliding away. Or was it only an illusion of his excited fancy, and did the flowers bend to the soft breeze that now breathed through the hot air, growing constantly stronger and stronger, so that a rustling and murmuring arose in the forest behind him, the treetops at his feet began to whisper, and at last the cool fresh wind from the sea blew over the panting earth. The spell was broken; Gotthold again looked at the landscape; but now with the eye of the artist, who is seeking to obtain the best view of his subject. "I chose the morning light then, if one can call it choice; it was a mistake and I must arrange the atmospheric effect artistically, but the sun should be at a moderate height above the horizon, almost directly over the smithy; that will be about six o'clock, and I can have what I need until eight. I think it will prove a picture which might satisfy others as well as yonder talkative lady." CHAPTER VII.