I explained as well as I could, which was not very, that my sniffs were sniffs of exultation.

“Ach so,” he said, indulgent with the indulgence one feels towards a newly arrived guest, before one knows what they are really like.

We drove on in silence after that.  Our wheels made hardly any noise on the sandy track, and I suddenly discovered how long it is since I’ve heard any birds.  I wish you had come with me here, little mother; I wish you had been on that drive this evening.  There were jays, and magpies, and woodpeckers, and little tiny birds like finches that kept on repeating in a monotonous sweet pipe the opening bar of the Beethoven C minor Symphony No. 5.  We met nobody the whole way except a man with a cartload of wood, who greeted the Oberforster with immense respect, and some dilapidated little children picking wild strawberries.  I wanted to remark on their dilapidation, which seemed very irregular in this well-conducted country, but thought I had best leave reasoned conversation alone till I’ve had time to learn more German, which I’m going to do diligently here, and till the Oberforster has discovered he needn’t shout in order to make me understand.  Sitting so close to my ear, when he shouted into it it was exactly as though some one had hit me, and hurt just as much.

He is a huge rawboned man, with the flat-backed head and protruding ears so many Germans have.  What is it that is left out of their heads, I wonder?  His moustache is like the Kaiser’s, and he looks rather a fine figure of a man in his grey-green forester’s uniform and becoming slouch hat with a feather stuck in it.  Without his hat he is less impressive, because of his head.  I suppose he has to have a head, but if he didn’t have to he’d be very good-looking.

This is such a sweet place, little mother.  I’ve got the dearest little clean bare bedroom, so attractive after the grim splendours of my drawingroom-bedroom at Frau Berg’s.  You can’t think how lovely it is being here after the long hot journey.  It’s no fun travelling alone in Germany if you’re a woman.  I was elbowed about and pushed out of the way at stations by any men and boys there were as if I had been an ownerless trunk.  Either that, or they stared incredibly, and said things.  One little boy—­he couldn’t have been more than ten—­winked at me and whispered something about kissing.  The station at Stettin was horrible, much worse than the Berlin one.  I don’t know where they all came from, the crowds of hooligan boys, just below military age, and extraordinarily disreputable and insolent.  To add to the confusion on the platform there were hundreds of Russians and Poles with their families and bundles—­I asked my porter who they were, and he told me—­being taken from one place where they had been working in the fields to another place, shepherded by a German overseer with a fierce dog and a revolver; very poor and ragged, all of them,