“There’s the hot, white road we walked along so often with the two Brueder always at our heels,” he thought; “and there, by Jove, is the turn through the forest to ‘Die Galgen,’ the stone gallows where they hanged the witches in olden days!”

He smiled a little as the train slid past.

“And there’s the copse where the Lilies of the Valley powdered the ground in spring; and, I swear,”—­he put his head out with a sudden impulse—­“if that’s not the very clearing where Calame, the French boy, chased the swallow-tail with me, and Bruder Pagel gave us half-rations for leaving the road without permission, and for shouting in our mother tongues!” And he laughed again as the memories came back with a rush, flooding his mind with vivid detail.

The train stopped, and he stood on the grey gravel platform like a man in a dream.  It seemed half a century since he last waited there with corded wooden boxes, and got into the train for Strassbourg and home after the two years’ exile.  Time dropped from him like an old garment and he felt a boy again.  Only, things looked so much smaller than his memory of them; shrunk and dwindled they looked, and the distances seemed on a curiously smaller scale.

He made his way across the road to the little Gasthaus, and, as he went, faces and figures of former schoolfellows,—­German, Swiss, Italian, French, Russian,—­slipped out of the shadowy woods and silently accompanied him.  They flitted by his side, raising their eyes questioningly, sadly, to his.  But their names he had forgotten.  Some of the Brothers, too, came with them, and most of these he remembered by name—­Bruder Roest, Bruder Pagel, Bruder Schliemann, and the bearded face of the old preacher who had seen himself in the haunted gallery of those about to die—­Bruder Gysin.  The dark forest lay all about him like a sea that any moment might rush with velvet waves upon the scene and sweep all the faces away.  The air was cool and wonderfully fragrant, but with every perfumed breath came also a pallid memory....

Yet, in spite of the underlying sadness inseparable from such an experience, it was all very interesting, and held a pleasure peculiarly its own, so that Harris engaged his room and ordered supper feeling well pleased with himself, and intending to walk up to the old school that very evening.  It stood in the centre of the community’s village, some four miles distant through the forest, and he now recollected for the first time that this little Protestant settlement dwelt isolated in a section of the country that was otherwise Catholic.  Crucifixes and shrines surrounded the clearing like the sentries of a beleaguering army.  Once beyond the square of the village, with its few acres of field and orchard, the forest crowded up in solid phalanxes, and beyond the rim of trees began the country that was ruled by the priests of another faith.  He vaguely remembered, too, that the Catholics had showed sometimes a certain hostility towards the little Protestant oasis that flourished so quietly and benignly in their midst.  He had quite forgotten this.  How trumpery it all seemed now with his wide experience of life and his knowledge of other countries and the great outside world.  It was like stepping back, not thirty years, but three hundred.