'He seems to have given a great deal.'
'He needed to, to make good all his sins,' he replied with a smile. 'Many were the sins he committed.'
I smiled too. Posterity in the shape of the parishioners of Bobbin have been direct gainers by Wrangel's sins.
'Good, you see, comes out of evil,' I observed.
He shook his head.
'Well, painted pulpits do then,' I amended; for who that is in his senses would contradict a parson?
I gave a last glance at the quaint pulpit across which a shaft of coloured sunlight lay, inquired if I might make an offering for the poor of Bobbin, made it, thanked my amiable guide, and was accompanied by him out into the heat that danced among the tombstones down to the carriage. To the last he was mild and kind, tucking the Holland cover round me with the same solicitude that he might have shown in a January snowstorm.
Glowe, my destination, is not far from Bobbin. On the way we passed the Schloss with the four towers where the wicked Wrangel committed all those sins that presently crystallised into a painted pulpit. The Schloss, called the Spyker Schloss, is let to a farmer. We met him riding home, to his coffee, I suppose, it being now nearly five, and I caught a glimpse of a beautiful old garden with ancient pyramids of box, many flowers, broad alleys, and an aggressively new baby in a perambulator beneath the trees, rending the holy quiet of the afternoon with its shrieks. They pursued us quite a long way along the bald high road that brought us after another mile to Glowe.
Glowe is a handful of houses built between the high road and the sea. There is nothing on the other side of the road but a great green plain stretching to the Bodden. We stopped at the first inn we came to—it was almost the first house—a meek, ugly little place, with the following severe advice to tourists hanging up in the entrance:—
Sag was Du willst kurz und bestimmt.
Lass alle schöne Phrasen fehlen;
Wer nutzlos unsere Zeit uns nimmt
Bestiehlt uns—und Du sollst nicht stehlen.