It happened, that midway on the lake he perceived his boatman about to prime a pistol to murder the mild-eyed stillness, and he called to the man in his best German to desist.  During the altercation, there passed a countryman of his in another of the punts, who said gravely:  ’I thank you for that.’  It was early morning, and they had the lake to themselves, each deeming the other an intruder; for the courtship of solitude wanes when we are haunted by a second person in pursuit of it; he is discolouring matter in our pure crystal cup.  Such is the worship of the picturesque; and it would appear to say, that the spirit of man finds itself yet in the society of barbarians.  The case admits of good pleading either way, even upon the issue whether the exclusive or the vulgar be the more barbarous.  But in those days the solicitation of the picturesque had been revived by a poet of some impassioned rhetoric, and two devotees could hardly meet, as the two met here, and not be mutually obscurants.

They stepped ashore in turn on the same small shoot of land where a farm-house near a chapel in the shadow of cliffs did occasional service for an inn.  Each had intended to pass a day and a night in this lonely dwelling-place by the lake, but a rival was less to be tolerated there than in love, and each awaited the other’s departure, with an air that said:  ‘You are in my sunlight’; and going deeper, more sternly:  ’Sir, you are an offence to Nature’s pudency!’

Woodseer was the more placable of the two; he had taken possession of the bench outside, and he had his note-book and much profundity to haul up with it while fish were frying.  His countryman had rushed inside to avoid him, and remained there pacing the chamber like a lion newly caged.  Their boatmen were brotherly in the anticipation of provision and payment.

After eating his fish, Woodseer decided abruptly, that as he could not have the spot to himself, memorable as it would have been to intermarry with Nature in so sacred a welldepth of the mountains, he had better be walking and climbing.  Another boat paddling up the lake had been spied:  solitude was not merely shared with a rival, but violated by numbers.  In the first case, we detest the man; in the second, we fly from an outraged scene.  He wrote a line or so in his book, hurriedly paid his bill, and started, full of the matter he had briefly committed to his pages.

At noon, sitting beside the beck that runs from the lake, he was overtaken by the gentleman he had left behind, and accosted in the informal English style, with all the politeness possible to a nervously blunt manner:  ’This book is yours,—­I have no doubt it is yours; I am glad to be able to restore it; I should be glad to be the owner-writer of the contents, I mean.  I have to beg your excuse; I found it lying open; I looked at the page, I looked through the whole; I am quite at your mercy.’

Woodseer jumped at the sight of his note-book, felt for the emptiness of his pocket, and replied:  ’Thank you, thank you.  It’s of use to me, though to no one else.’