crumbling into comic opera.  But now my comrade approached me, aglow with social excitement, and, with a franker look in his eyes than he had before shown, addressed me:  “Mein lieber Herr Professor, we have had a good ramble together and talked about many things.  You have been confidential with me, and hoped that I would be with you.  I have preferred to hold back, but now as we part I ought to tell you who I am.  I am the premier danseur in the ballet of the Royal Opera House in Berlin.  Worn with the heavy work in Fantasca, which we produced elaborately and which ran long, I came down here when the season closed, for change and rest, and so fell in with you.  These young Herren and Damen are the coryphes and figurantes, who in Berlin or in other cities have taken part with me in productions.  Good people they are and unsurpassed as a corps de ballet.”  We touched glasses, shook hands, and I went my way leaving Comus with his rout, guileless, I hope, as Milton’s innocent “Lady,” but such scales never fell from her starry eyes as fell from mine.  I knew well about Fantasca.  During my last weeks in Berlin it had been much talked about, a splendid theatrical spectacle put on with consummate art, and lavish expenditure.  I had not seen it.  Heredity from eight Puritan generations reinforced by impecuniosity had kept me from that.  But I had heard of the wonderful visions of beauty and grace.  My handsome comrade of the Bavarian Alps had been at the centre of it all, the god Apollo, or whatever glittering divinity or genius it was that swayed the enchantments and led in the rhythmic circlings.  Good cause indeed I had had to admire his physical beauty.  He had been picked out for that no doubt among thousands, then painfully trained for years until in figure and frame he was a model.

The gay pleasure garden in which we had parted lay close to a gloomy monastic structure, centuries old, that from a height dominated the little town.  The garden and the structure were symbols of what was most salient in that country—­the ancient church braced against progress, with its power broken in no way, and on the other hand of a life interpenetrated with things graceful and refined, with art, music, and poetry, but seamed, too, with frivolity and what makes for the pleasures of sense.  My two friends also were in their way types,—­the cowled Franciscan, aloof in a mediaeval seclusion though he breathed nineteenth-century air, and the dancer whom I encountered in the vale, above which the Watzmann upholds forever its solemn mitre.  But they were good fellows both, my comrade in and my comrade out.  The monk’s heart was not too shrivelled to flow with human kindness, and the dancer had not unlearned in the glare of the foot-lights the graces of a gentleman.