My host is a splendid old fellow.  He is called Justice, although he certainly has another name too; for that name, you see, has reference only to the ownership of his property.  I hear, however, that this is the custom around here everywhere.  For the most part only the estate has a name—­the name of the owner sinks in that of the property; hence the earth-born, tough and enduring character of the people here.  My Justice is a man of some sixty-odd years perhaps, but he carries a strong, large, rugged body, as yet unbent by age.  In his reddish-yellow face is deposited the solar heat of the fifty harvests he has gathered in, his large nose stands out on his face like a tower, and his white, bristly eyebrows hang out over his glistening, blue eyes like a straw roof.  He reminds me of a patriarch, who erects a monument of unhewn stones to the god of his ancestors and pours libations and oil upon it, rears his colts, cuts his corn, and at the same time judges and rules his people with unlimited authority.  I have never come across a more compact mixture of venerability and cunning, reason and obstinacy; he is a genuine, old-time, free peasant in the full sense of the word.  I believe that this is the only place where people of this kind are still to be found, here where precisely this living apart and this stubbornness peculiar to the ancient Saxons, combined with the absence of large cities, has perpetuated the original character of Germania.  All governments and powers have merely skimmed over the surface here; they have perhaps been able to break off the tops of the various growths, but not to destroy their roots, from which fresh shoots have ever sprouted up again, even though they may no longer close together into leafy crowns.

The region is not at all what one would call beautiful, for it consists solely of billowy risings and fallings of the ground, and only in the distance does one see the mountains; furthermore, the latter look more like a dark hill-slope than a beautifully outlined mountain-range.  But just this absence of pretension, the fact that the mountains do not seem to place themselves in dress parade directly in front of one’s eyes and say:  “How do you like me?” but rather, like a dutiful stewardess, to serve the tilth of human hands even down to the smallest detail—­after all makes me like them very much, and I have enjoyed many a pleasant hour in my solitary rambles.  Perhaps the fact has something to do with it that my heart can once more swing out its pendulum undisturbed, without having wise people tinkering and twisting at the clock-works.

I have even become poetic—­what do you say to that, old Ernst?  I have jotted down something to which a divinely beautiful Sunday that I spent some time ago in the wooded glens of the Spessart inspired me.  I think you will like it.  It is called:  “The Marvels of the Spessart.”