And thus he dreamed and threw his straws into the stream. They moved away slowly and disappeared between the moss-covered timbers. Involuntarily his fancy had transmuted them into the characters of his world of romance. There went the countess with her long train, which got caught in the moss and held the countess fast. The virtuous Amalia met with no better luck; she got tangled up in the water lentils. And now came Walter himself. He approached Amalia, in her green robes, and was just about to rescue her, when he was swallowed by a duck. This was most unkind of the duck, for it was Walter’s last stalk of grass; and now in the rattling and buzzing of the sawmills below he could hear Amalia repeating in a reproachful voice:
“Warre, warre, warre, we;
Where is warre, warre, wall—
Walter, who will rescue me?”
This annoyed him, and he could not resist the temptation to throw a rock at the duck whose greediness had caused Amalia to doubt his chivalry.
The duck chose the better part, and retired after she had done Walter all the damage she could. But the sawmills paid no attention to these happenings and continued to rattle away.
Walter heard now in the noisy clatter of the mills all kinds of songs and stories, and, listening to these, he soon forgot Amalia and the Pope. That the reader may not get a wrong impression of these mills, I hasten to say that there was really nothing extraordinary about them. They buzzed and rattled just like other sawmills.
It often happens that we think we perceive something which comes from the external world, when in fact it is only a subjective product in ourselves. Similarly, we may think we have just imagined something, when really it came to us from the world of the senses.
This is a kind of ventriloquism that often gives cause for annoyance and enmity.
I wonder which turns the faster?—Walter listened to the mills. Now—I think—no, begin together. Good! No, the Eagle was ahead! Once more—now!