Hans:  “Listen then.  The world has forsaken me, I forsook the world, I wandered in the solitude of the forest, longing for death but finding none.  I fed upon roots, and in my bitterness I dug for the bitterest, loathing the sweeter kind.  Digging, three days agone, I struck a manure mine!—­a Golconda, a limitless Bonanza, of solid manure!  I can buy you all, and have mountain ranges of manure left!  Ha-ha, now thou smilest a smile!” [Immense sensation.] Exhibition of specimens from the mine.  Old Huss (enthusiastically):  “Wake her up, shake her up, noble young man, she is yours!” Wedding takes place on the spot; bookkeeper restored to his office and emoluments; Paul Hoch led off to jail.  The Bonanza king of the Black Forest lives to a good old age, blessed with the love of his wife and of his twenty-seven children, and the still sweeter envy of everybody around.

We took our noon meal of fried trout one day at the Plow Inn, in a very pretty village (Ottenhoefen), and then went into the public room to rest and smoke.  There we found nine or ten Black Forest grandees assembled around a table.  They were the Common Council of the parish.  They had gathered there at eight o’clock that morning to elect a new member, and they had now been drinking beer four hours at the new member’s expense.  They were men of fifty or sixty years of age, with grave good-natured faces, and were all dressed in the costume made familiar to us by the Black Forest stories; broad, round-topped black felt hats with the brims curled up all round; long red waistcoats with large metal buttons, black alpaca coats with the waists up between the shoulders.  There were no speeches, there was but little talk, there were no frivolities; the Council filled themselves gradually, steadily, but surely, with beer, and conducted themselves with sedate decorum, as became men of position, men of influence, men of manure.

We had a hot afternoon tramp up the valley, along the grassy bank of a rushing stream of clear water, past farmhouses, water-mills, and no end of wayside crucifixes and saints and Virgins.  These crucifixes, etc., are set up in memory of departed friends, by survivors, and are almost as frequent as telegraph-poles are in other lands.

We followed the carriage-road, and had our usual luck; we traveled under a beating sun, and always saw the shade leave the shady places before we could get to them.  In all our wanderings we seldom managed to strike a piece of road at its time for being shady.  We had a particularly hot time of it on that particular afternoon, and with no comfort but what we could get out of the fact that the peasants at work away up on the steep mountainsides above our heads were even worse off than we were.  By and by it became impossible to endure the intolerable glare and heat any longer; so we struck across the ravine and entered the deep cool twilight of the forest, to hunt for what the guide-book called the “old road.”