The resemblance to the well-known scene in the German child’s book was perfect, and as the children shouted,—­

  “Ein kohlpechrabenschwarzer Mohr,
  Die Sonne schien ihm ins gehirn,
  Da nahm er seinen Sonnenschirm”—­

more than one grown person joined therein.

Stangrave longed to catch hold of the boy, and extract from him all news; but the blackamoor was not quite in respectable company enough at that moment; and Stangrave had to wait till he strutted proudly up to the door, and entered the hall with a bland smile, evidently having taken the hooting as a homage to his personal appearance.

“Ah?  Mas’ Stangrave? glad see you, sir!  Quite a party of us, now, ’mong dese ‘barian heathen foreigners.  Mas’ Thurnall he come dis mornin’; gone up picken’ bush wid de ladies.  He! he!  Not seen him dis tree year afore.”

“Thurnall!” Stangrave’s heart sank within him.  His first impulse was to order a carriage, and return whence he came; but it would look so odd, and, moreover, be so foolish, that he made up his mind to stay and face the worst.  So he swallowed a hasty dinner, and then wandered up the narrow valley, with all his suspicions of Thurnall and Marie seething more fiercely than ever in his heart.

Some half-mile up, a path led out of the main road to a wooden bridge across the stream.  He followed it, careless whither he went; and in five minutes found himself in the quaintest little woodland cavern he ever had seen.

It was simply a great block of black lava, crowned with brushwood, and supported on walls and pillars of Dutch cheeses, or what should have been Dutch cheeses by all laws of shape and colour, had not his fingers proved to them that they were stone.  How they got there, and what they were, puzzled him; for he was no geologist; and finding a bench inside, he sat down and speculated thereon.

There was more than one doorway to the “Cheese Cellar.”  It stood beneath a jutting knoll, and the path ran right through; so that, as he sat, he could see up a narrow gorge to his left, roofed in with trees; and down into the main valley on his right, where the Issbach glittered clear and smooth beneath red-berried mountain-ash and yellow leaves.

There he sat, and tried to forget Marie in the tinkling of the streams, and the sighing of the autumn leaves, and the cooing of the sleepy doves; while the ice-bird, as the Germans call the water-ouzel, sat on a rock in the river below, and warbled his low sweet song, and then flitted up the grassy reach to perch and sing again on the next rock above.

And, whether, it was that he did forget Marie awhile; or whether he were tired, as he well might have been; or whether he had too rapidly consumed his bottle of red Walporzheimer, forgetful that it alone of German wines combines the delicacy of the Rhine sun with the potency of its Burgundian vinestock, transplanted to the Ahr by Charlemagne;—­ whether it were any of these causes, or whether it were not, Stangrave fell fast asleep in the Kaise-kellar, and slept till it was dark, at the risk of catching a great cold.