The caravaners

THE CARAVANERS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR Elizabeth and Her German Garden Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight The Solitary Summer
The fitful flicker of the lanterns played over rapidly cooling eggs and grave faces
BY THE AUTHOR OF “ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN”
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR LITLE NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1910 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY



THE CARAVANERS
IN JUNE this year there were a few fine days, and we supposed the summer had really come at last. The effect was to make us feel our flat (which is really a very nice, well-planned one on the second floor at the corner overlooking the cemetery, and not at all stuffy) but a dull place after all, and think with something like longing of the country. It was the year of the fifth anniversary of our wedding, and having decided to mark the occasion by a trip abroad in the proper holiday season of August we could not afford, neither did we desire, to spend money on trips into the country in June. My wife, therefore, suggested that we should devote a few afternoons to a series of short excursions within a radius of, say, from five to ten miles round our town, and visit one after the other those of our acquaintances who live near enough to Storchwerder and farm their own estates. “In this way,” said she, “we shall get much fresh air at little cost.”
After a time I agreed. Not immediately, of course, for a reasonable man will take care to consider the suggestions made by his wife from every point of view before consenting to follow them or allowing her to follow them. Women do not reason: they have instincts; and instincts would land them in strange places sometimes if it were not that their husbands are there to illuminate the path for them and behave, if one may so express it, as a kind of guiding and very clever glow-worm. As for those who have not succeeded in getting husbands, the flotsam and jetsam, so to speak, of their sex, all I can say is, God help them.