While walking we usually sung songs, among them very nonsensical ones, if only we could keep step well to their time.  Often one of the teachers told us a story.  Schaffner and Bagge could do this best, but we often met other pedestrians with whom we entered into conversation.  How delightful is the memory of these tramps!  Progress on foot is slow, but not only do we see ten times better than from a carriage or the window of a car, but we hear and learn something while talking with the mechanics, citizens, and peasants who are going the same way, or the landlords, bar-maids, and table companions we meet in the taverns, whose guests live according to the custom of the country instead of the international pattern of our great hotels.

As a young married man, I always anticipated as the greatest future happiness taking pedestrian tours with my sons like the Keilhau ones; but Fate ordained otherwise.

On our return to the institute we were received with great rejoicing; and how much the different parties, now united, had to tell one another!

Study recommenced on the first of October, and during the leisure days before that time the village church festival was celebrated under the village linden, with plenty of cakes, and a dance of the peasants, in which we older ones took part.  But we were obliged to devote several hours of every day to describing our journey for our relatives at home.  Each one filled a large book, which was to be neatly written.  The exercise afforded better practice in describing personal experiences than a dozen essays which had been previously read with the teacher.

CHAPTER XVI.

AUTUMN, WINTER, EASTER AND DEPARTURE

Autumn had come, and this season of the year, which afterwards was to be the most fraught with suffering, at that time seemed perhaps the pleasantest; for none afforded a better opportunity for wrestling and playing.  It brought delicious fruit, and never was the fire lighted more frequently on the hearth in the plots of ground assigned to the pupils—­baking and boiling were pleasant during the cool afternoons.

No month seemed to us so cheery as October.  During its course the apples and pears were gathered, and an old privilege allowed the pupils “to glean”—­that is, to claim the fruit left on the trees.  This tested the keenness of our young eyes, but it sometimes happened that we confounded trees still untouched with those which had been harvested.  “Nitimur in vetitum semper cupimusque negata,”—­[The forbidden charms, and the unexpected lures us.]—­is an excellent saying of Ovid, whose truth, when he tested it in person, was the cause of his exile.  It sometimes brought us into conflict with the owners of the trees, and it was only natural that “Froebel’s youngsters” often excited the peasants’ ire.

Gellert, it is true, has sung: 

          “Enjoy what the Lord has granted,
          Grieve not for aught withheld.”