’Fancy those pines saying, “There go two more,” Temple.  Well; and fancy this—­a little earth-dwarf as broad as I’m long and high as my shoulder.  One day he met the loveliest girl in the whole country, and she promised to marry him in twenty years’ time, in return for a sack of jewels worth all Germany and half England.  You should have seen her dragging it home.  People thought it full of charcoal.  She married the man she loved, and the twenty years passed over, and at the stroke of the hour when she first met the dwarf, thousands of bells began ringing through the forest, and her husband cries out, “What is the meaning of it?” and they rode up to a garland of fresh flowers that dropped on her head, and right into a gold ring that closed on her finger, and—­look, Temple, look!’

‘Where?’ asked the dear little fellow, looking in all earnest, from which the gloom of the place may be imagined, for, by suddenly mixing it with my absurd story, I discomposed his air of sovereign indifference as much as one does the surface of a lake by casting a stone in it.

We rounded the rocky corner of the gorge at a slightly accelerated pace in dead silence.  It opened out to restorative daylight, and we breathed better and chaffed one another, and, beholding a house with pendent gold grapes, applauded the diligence conductor’s expressive pantomime.  The opportunity was offered for a draught of wine, but we held water preferable, so we toasted the Priscilla out of the palms of our hands in draughts of water from a rill that had the sound of aspen-leaves, such as I used to listen to in the Riversley meadows, pleasantly familiar.

Several commanding elevations were in sight, some wooded, some bare.  We chose the nearest, to observe the sunset, and concurred in thinking it unlike English sunsets, though not so very unlike the sunset we had taken for sunrise on board the Priscilla.  A tumbled, dark and light green country of swelling forest-land and slopes of meadow ran to the West, and the West from flaming yellow burned down to smoky crimson across it.  Temple bade—­me ‘catch the disc—­that was English enough.’  A glance at the sun’s disc confirmed the truth of his observation.  Gazing on the outline of the orb, one might have fancied oneself in England.  Yet the moment it had sunk under the hill this feeling of ours vanished with it.  The coloured clouds drew me ages away from the recollection of home.

A tower on a distant hill, white among pines, led us to suppose that Sarkeld must lie somewhere beneath it.  We therefore descended straight toward the tower, instead of returning to the road, and struck confidently into a rugged path.  Recent events had given me the assurance that in my search for my father I was subject to a special governing direction.  I had aimed at the Bench—­missed it—­been shipped across sea and precipitated into the arms of friends who had seen him and could tell me I was on his actual track, only blindly, and no longer blindly now.