I helped Frau Bornsted get supper ready, and was glad to escape into the peace of the kitchen and stand safely frying potatoes.  She was very sweet in her demure Sunday frock of plain black, and high up round her ears a little white frill.  The solemnity and youth and quaintness of her are very attractive, and I could easily love her if it weren’t for this madness about Deutschland.  She is as mad as any of them, and in her it is much more disconcerting.  We will be discoursing together gravely—­she is always grave, and never knows how funny we both are being really—­about amusing things like husbands and when and if I’m ever going to get one, and she, full of the dignity and wisdom of the married, will be giving me much sage counsel with sobriety and gentleness, when something starts her off about Deutschland.  Oh, they are intolerable about their Deutschland!

The Oberforster is calling for this—­he’s driving to the post, so good-bye little darling mother, little beloved and precious one.

  Your Chris.

  Schuppenfelde, Thursday, July 16, 1914.

My blessed mother,

Here’s Thursday evening in my week of nothing to do, and me meaning to write every day to you, and I haven’t done it since Monday.  It’s because I’ve had so much time.  Really it’s because I’ve been in a sort of sleep of loveliness.  I’ve been doing nothing except be happy.  Not a soul has been near us since Sunday, and Frau Bornsted says not a soul will, till next Sunday.  Each morning I’ve come down to a perfect world, with the sun shining through roses on to our breakfast-table in the porch, and after breakfast I’ve crossed the road and gone into the forest and not come back till late afternoon.

Frau Bornsted has been sweet about it, giving me a little parcel of food and sending me off with many good wishes for a happy day.  I wanted to help her do her housework, but except my room she won’t let me, having had orders from Kloster that I was to be completely idle.  And it is doing me good.  I feel so perfectly content these last three days.  There’s nothing fretful about me any more; I feel harmonized, as if I were so much a part of the light and the air and the forest that I don’t know now where they leave off and I begin.  I sit and watch the fine-weather clouds drifting slowly across the tree-tops, and wonder if heaven is any better.  I go down to the edge of the Haff, and lie on my face in the long grass, and push up my sleeves, and slowly stir the shallow golden water about among the rushes.  I pick wild strawberries to eat with my lunch, and after lunch I lie on the moss and learn the Psalm for the day, first in English and then in German.  About five I begin to go home, walking slowly through the hot scents of the afternoon forest, feeling as solemn and as exulting as I suppose a Catholic does when he comes away, shriven and blest, from confession.  In the evening we