by the splintery lath trough, in which the skittle-boy rolled back the balls.  My only reason for choosing this position was because I had heard a short time before that one of the players at this very alley, in catching a ball as it rolled to him, had run a long lath splinter under the nail of his index finger.  That had made such an impression on me that I always stood there shuddering for fear of a repetition of the accident, which fortunately did not occur.  When I finally grew tired of waiting I stepped through a lattice gate, always hanging aslant and always creaky, into a garden plot running along close by the skittle-alley and parallel with it.  It was a genuine peasant’s garden, with touch-me-nots and mignonette in bloom, and in one place the mallows grew so tall that they formed a lane.  Then when the sun went down behind the forest the Golm, which lay to the west, was bathed in red light, and the metal ball on its tall pillar looked down, like a sphere of gold, upon the village and the skittle-garden.  Myriads of mosquitoes hung in the air, and the bumble bees flew back and forth between the box-edged beds.

Our visitors usually left at the beginning of August, and when September came the last of the hotel guests departed from the city.  If anybody chose to remain longer it was inconvenient for the landlords, in which connection the following scene occurred.  A man, a Berliner of course, on returning to his hotel, after accompanying some departing friends to their steamer, sat down leisurely by his host and hostess, rubbed his hands together, and said:  “Well, Hoppensack, at last the Berliners are all gone, or at least nearly all of them; now we shall have a good time, now it will be cozy.”  He expected, of course, that the host and hostess would agree with him most heartily.  But instead of that he found himself looking into long faces.  Finally he screwed up his courage and asked why they were so indifferent.  “Why, good heavens, Mr. Schuenemann,” said Hoppensack, “a recorder and his wife came to us the last of May and now it is almost the middle of September.  We want to be alone again, you see.”  As Mrs. Hoppensack nodded approvingly, there was nothing left for Schuenemann to do but to depart himself the next day.

Not long after the last summer guests had gone the equinoctial storms set in, and, if it was a bad year, they lasted on into November.  First the chestnuts fell, then the tiles rattled down from the roof, and from the eaves-troughs, always placed with their outlets close by bedroom windows, the rain splashed noisily down into the yard.  In the course of time, scattered clouds sailed across the clearing sky and the air turned cold.  Everybody felt the chilliness, and all day long there was an old woodchopper at work in the shed.  My father would often go down to see him, take the ax and split wood for him a half-hour at a time.