For just a second more Falbe hesitated.  Then he held out his hand.

“I thank you most awfully,” he said.  “I accept with the greatest pleasure.”

Michael drew a long breath of relief.

“I am glad,” he said.  “So that’s settled.  It’s really nice of you.”

The heat of the day was passing off, and over the sun-bleached plain the coolness of evening was beginning to steal.  Overhead the wind stirred more resonantly in the pines, and in the bushes birds called to each other.  Presently after, they rose from where they had lain all the afternoon and strolled along the needled slope to where, through a vista in the trees, they looked down on the lake and the hamlet that clustered near it.  Down the road that wound through the trees towards it passed labourers going homeward from their work, with cheerful guttural cries to each other and a herd of cows sauntered by with bells melodiously chiming, taking leisurely mouthfuls from the herbage of the wayside.  In the village, lying low in the clear dusk, scattered lights began to appear, the smoke of evening fires to ascend, and the aromatic odour of the burning wood strayed towards them up the wind.

Falbe, whose hand lay in the crook of Michael’s arm, pointed downwards to the village that lay there sequestered and rural.

“That’s Germany,” he said; “it’s that which lies at the back of every German heart.  There lie the springs of the Rhine.  It’s out of that originally that there came all that Germany stands for, its music, its poetry, its philosophy, its kultur.  All flowed from these quiet uplands.  It was here that the nation began to think and to dream.  To dreamt!  It’s out of dreams that all has sprung.”

He laughed.

“And then next week when we go to Munich, you will find me saying that this, this Athens of a town, with its museums and its galleries and its music, is Germany.  I shall be right, too.  Out of much dreaming comes the need to make.  It is when the artist’s head and heart are full of his dreams that his hands itch for the palette or the piano.  Nuremberg!  Cannot we stop a few hours, at least, in Nuremberg, and see the meadow by the Pegnitz where the Meistersingers held their contest of song and the wooden, gabled house where Albrecht Durer lived?  That will teach you Germany, too.  The bud of their dream was opening then; and what flower, even in the magnificence of its full-blowing, is so lovely?  Albrecht Durer, with his deep, patient eyes, and his patient hands with their unerring stroke; or Bach, with the fugue flowing from his brain through his quick fingers, making stars—­stars fixed forever in the heaven of harmony!  Don’t tell me that there is anything in the world more wonderful!  We may have invented a few more instruments, we may have experimented with a few more combinations of notes, but in the B minor Mass, or in the music of the Passion, all is said.  And all that came from the woods and the country and the quiet life in little towns, when the artist did his work because he loved it, and cared not one jot about what anybody else thought about it.  We are a nation of thinkers and dreamers.”