“Madam,” he said, removing his hat, “if you will not allow me the liberty of expressing to you the delight I have in these mountains, I shall be forced to soliloquize. I find it impossible to contain myself.”
“Speak freely, sir!” she said with a pleasant look, but some stateliness. “If I were not a daughter of the mountains, I think this scene would force me to speak, if I had to soliloquize.”
“I have never been here before,” the gentleman said. “I had not known that Mother Earth could be so beautiful, so eloquent. Does she not speak? Does she not sing? Who will interpret to us her language, her messages?”
“Once upon a time,” the lady said, “a saintly ruler showed his people a grain of gold that had been dug out of a wild rough place in the earth; and he told them that where he found it the earth had given him a message for them. It was this:
“‘Dig for your gold, my children! says Earth, your Mother. Deep in your hearts it lies hidden.’”
The gentleman looked out of the window in silence for awhile. Then he opened a hand-bag that lay on the seat by his side, and wrote a few words in a note-book there. The book was a little red morocco one, with the name Ludwig von Ritter in gilt letters on the cover.
They spoke of the scenery as they went on, and presently approached a station.
“I shall in future take my recreation in traveling,” the gentleman said. “I have heretofore taken it in the social pleasures of Paris or Vienna. One spends time very gayly in either of those capitals.”
The lady was silent a moment, then murmured as if to herself:
“E poi?”