The river flowed on its way in the last rays of the setting sun. Its smooth surface was still steeped in purple, and a wide-meshed network of silver ribbons, at one place melting into each other, at another clearly defined and intermingled with fantastic shapes, reeds, flowers, and sedges, spread itself over the darkly glowing water. But the willows, which kept watch like sentinels on the bank in vague shadowy rows, were already casting broad bands of darkness across the edge of the shining mirror, and these were slowly encroaching on its centre.
The distance lay veiled in a blue haze. Here and there a damp mist mounted from the meadows and clung in silvery wisps about the tops of solitary clumps of poplars which rose above the level, wide-spreading fields, and stood outlined sharply against the rosy glow of the evening sky. Silence reigned far and wide. From time to time a dog in some invisible farmyard bayed sleepily. A broody reed-sparrow now and then gave an anxious twitter, as if in fear of an enemy, and high aloft the subdued cry of a kingfisher, returning late from the chase to its nest, sounded through the air.
There was life on the water. A raft on its way into the valley revolved lazily in the circle of light, which grew gradually smaller, and being now cut in two, threatened to vanish soon altogether in darkness. Like a great snake with fiery jaws it drifted there. The flames beneath the supper-cauldron blazed, and blue-grey vapour ascended to paint a long strip of cloud on the evening sky, where here and there a star shyly opened its eye.
A vehicle came rattling along the high-road which led from Münsterberg to the ferry in the village of Wengern, and drew up at the ferry station, which was deserted and dark, ferry-boat and man having retired to rest on the other side. The powerful outline of Leo's athletic figure filled the back seat. He was leaning back indolently, whistling snatches of a nameless song and sending forth clouds of smoke from a short clay pipe. Pulling himself erect, he cried out in a voice of thunder to the opposite bank, "Ferryman, a-hoy!"
Some time elapsed before he was answered by a sign of life. The light of a lantern moving hither and thither at last settled its course, and from the end of the raft cast a long gold line across the stream.
The driver, who was a young strapping peasant lad, belonging to the stables of the Prussian Crown, turned round on the box, and begging the "gnädiger Herr's" pardon, suggested that it was not the proper big ferry-boat but only a skiff which was coming across.
Leo gave vent to his ire in a salvo of Spanish oaths, and the driver thought the best thing to do would be to send the ferryman back.
"So that I may kick my heels here for another half-hour," Leo said. "No, my lad, I would rather use my own strong legs, and enter my ancestral home on foot. Have you a home, my lad?"
"Why, of course, sir," the driver replied. "My father sent me out to service that I might learn something of the ways of the world."
Leo chuckled, and went on smoking in silence. Every word of the broad, homely dialect that fell on his ear, every fair sunburnt honest countenance that met his eye, renewed his affection for his half-forgotten birthplace.