all collapsed, and had to be driven back to the railway in a hay-cart, in the last stages of exhaustion.  Finding that he could not walk me down, Vieweg developed an odd sort of liking for me, just as I had admired him for standing up to his knees in very cold water for a couple of hours on end whilst fishing.  So a queer sort of friendship sprang up between me and this taciturn youth.  The only subject which moved Vieweg to eloquence was quinine, out of which his father had made his fortune.  I confess that at that time I knew no more about that admirable prophylactic than the Queen of Sheba knew about dry-fly fishing, and had not the faintest idea of how quinine was made.  Vieweg, warming to his subject, explained to me that the cinchona bark was treated with lime and alcohol, and informed me that his father now obtained the bark from Java instead of from South America as formerly.  He did his utmost to endeavour to kindle a little enthusiasm in me on the subject of this valuable febrifuge.  When not talking of quinine, he kept silence.  This singular youth was obsessed with a passionate devotion to the lucrative drug.

The Harz Mountains are pretty without being grand.  The far-famed Brocken is not 4000 ft. high, but rising as these hills do out of the dead-flat North German plain, the Harz have been glorified and magnified by a people accustomed to monotonous levels, and are the setting for innumerable German legends.  The Brocken is, of course, the traditional scene of the “Witches Sabbath” on Walpurgis-Nacht, and many of the rock-strewn valleys seem to have pleasant traditions of bloodthirsty ogres and gnomes associated with them.  There is no real climbing in the Harz, easy tracks lead to all the local lions.  As is customary in methodical Germany, signposts direct the pedestrian to every view and every waterfall, and I need hardly add that if one post indicates the Aussichtspunkt, a corresponding one will show the way to the restaurant without which no view in Germany would be complete.  Through rocky defiles and pine-woods, over swelling hills and past waterfalls, Vieweg and I trudged once a week in sociable silence, broken only by a few scraps of information from my companion as to the prospects of that year’s crop of cinchona bark, and the varying wholesale price of that interesting commodity.  At times, before a fine view, Vieweg would make quite a long speech for him:  “Du Fritz!  Schon was?” using, of course, the German diminutive to my Christian name, after which he would gaze on the prospect and relapse into silence, and dreamy meditations on sulphate of quinine and its possibilities.

I think Vieweg enjoyed these excursions, for on returning to Brunswick after about four hours’ un-broken silence, he would always say on parting, “Du Fritz!  War nicht so ubel;” or, “Fritz, it wasn’t so bad,” very high praise from so sparing a talker.