All our afternoon’s progress had been uphill.  About five or half past we reached the summit, and all of a sudden the dense curtain of the forest parted and we looked down into a deep and beautiful gorge and out over a wide panorama of wooded mountains with their summits shining in the sun and their glade-furrowed sides dimmed with purple shade.  The gorge under our feet—­called Allerheiligen—­afforded room in the grassy level at its head for a cozy and delightful human nest, shut away from the world and its botherations, and consequently the monks of the old times had not failed to spy it out; and here were the brown and comely ruins of their church and convent to prove that priests had as fine an instinct seven hundred years ago in ferreting out the choicest nooks and corners in a land as priests have today.

A big hotel crowds the ruins a little, now, and drives a brisk trade with summer tourists.  We descended into the gorge and had a supper which would have been very satisfactory if the trout had not been boiled.  The Germans are pretty sure to boil a trout or anything else if left to their own devices.  This is an argument of some value in support of the theory that they were the original colonists of the wild islands of the coast of Scotland.  A schooner laden with oranges was wrecked upon one of those islands a few years ago, and the gentle savages rendered the captain such willing assistance that he gave them as many oranges as they wanted.  Next day he asked them how they liked them.  They shook their heads and said: 

“Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn’t things for a hungry man to hanker after.”

We went down the glen after supper.  It is beautiful—­a mixture of sylvan loveliness and craggy wildness.  A limpid torrent goes whistling down the glen, and toward the foot of it winds through a narrow cleft between lofty precipices and hurls itself over a succession of falls.  After one passes the last of these he has a backward glimpse at the falls which is very pleasing—­they rise in a seven-stepped stairway of foamy and glittering cascades, and make a picture which is as charming as it is unusual.

CHAPTER XXIII [Nicodemus Dodge and the Skeleton]

We were satisfied that we could walk to Oppenau in one day, now that we were in practice; so we set out the next morning after breakfast determined to do it.  It was all the way downhill, and we had the loveliest summer weather for it.  So we set the pedometer and then stretched away on an easy, regular stride, down through the cloven forest, drawing in the fragrant breath of the morning in deep refreshing draughts, and wishing we might never have anything to do forever but walk to Oppenau and keep on doing it and then doing it over again.