Now I may write about things that are pleasant. I cannot possibly tell you how happy I am here in the solitude of this hill-girt Westphalian plain, where I have been quartered for a week among people and cattle. Among people and cattle is indeed literally the case, for the cows do actually stand right in the house on both sides of the large entrance-hall. There is, however, absolutely nothing unpleasant or unclean about this; on the contrary it rather helps to increase the impression of patriarchal house-management. In front of my window stand rustling oak-trees, and beyond them I look out on long, long meadows and waving cornfields, between which I see here and there a grove of oaks and a lone farmstead. For here it is as it was in the time of Tacitus: "Colunt discreti ac diversi, ut fons, ut campus, ut nemus placuit." Consequently even a single farm like this is a small State in itself, complete and rounded off, and the lord of it is just as much a king in his small domain as a real king on a throne.
My host is a splendid old fellow. He is called Justice, although he certainly has another name too; for that name, you see, has reference only to the ownership of his property. I hear, however, that this is the custom around here everywhere. For the most part only the estate has a name—the name of the owner sinks in that of the property; hence the earth-born, tough and enduring character of the people here. My Justice is a man of some sixty-odd years perhaps, but he carries a strong, large, rugged body, as yet unbent by age. In his reddish-yellow face is deposited the solar heat of the fifty harvests he has gathered in, his large nose stands out on his face like a tower, and his white, bristly eyebrows hang out over his glistening, blue eyes like a straw roof. He reminds me of a patriarch, who erects a monument of unhewn stones to the god of his ancestors and pours libations and oil upon it, rears his colts, cuts his corn, and at the same time judges and rules his people with unlimited authority. I have never come across a more compact mixture of venerability and cunning, reason and obstinacy; he is a genuine, old-time, free peasant in the full sense of the word. I believe that this is the only place where people of this kind are still to be found, here where precisely this living apart and this stubbornness peculiar to the ancient Saxons, combined with the absence of large cities, has perpetuated the original character of Germania. All governments and powers have merely skimmed over the surface here; they have perhaps been able to break off the tops of the various growths, but not to destroy their roots, from which fresh shoots have ever sprouted up again, even though they may no longer close together into leafy crowns.
The region is not at all what one would call beautiful, for it consists solely of billowy risings and fallings of the ground, and only in the distance does one see the mountains; furthermore, the latter look more like a dark hill-slope than a beautifully outlined mountain-range. But just this absence of pretension, the fact that the mountains do not seem to place themselves in dress parade directly in front of one's eyes and say: "How do you like me?" but rather, like a dutiful stewardess, to serve the tilth of human hands even down to the smallest detail—after all makes me like them very much, and I have enjoyed many a pleasant hour in my solitary rambles. Perhaps the fact has something to do with it that my heart can once more swing out its pendulum undisturbed, without having wise people tinkering and twisting at the clock-works.
I have even become poetic—what do you say to that, old Ernst? I have jotted down something to which a divinely beautiful Sunday that I spent some time ago in the wooded glens of the Spessart inspired me. I think you will like it. It is called: "The Marvels of the Spessart."
What I like best is to sit up on the hill in a quiet spot between the Justice's cornfields, which terminate there. In front of me there is a large depression in the ground, grown over with weeds and blackberry bushes, around which, in a circle, lie a lot of large stones. Over the largest of these, directly opposite the field, the branches of three old lindens spread out. Behind me rustles the forest. The spot is infinitely lonesome, secluded and secret, especially now that the corn is grown up, as tall as a man, behind it. I spend a great deal of time up there—not always, to be sure, in sentimental contemplation of nature; it is my usual evening watchpost, from which I shoot the stags and roes out of the Justice's corn.
They call the place the "Freemen's Tribunal." Presumably, in days of yore, the Fehme used to hatch out its sentences there in the darkness of the night. When I praised the place to my Justice, an expression of friendliness passed over his face. He made no reply, but after a time conducted me, without any inducement on my part, to a room on the upper floor of the house. There he opened an iron-bound trunk, showed me an old, rusty sword which was lying in it, and said with great solemnity: "That is a great curiosity; it is the sword of Charles the Great, preserved for a thousand and more years in the Oberhof, and still in full strength and power." Without adding any further explanations, he clapped the cover down again. I wouldn't for anything have shaken his belief in this sacred relic, although a fleeting glance convinced me that the broad-sword could scarcely be more than a few hundred years old. But he showed me too a formal attestation concerning the genuineness of the weapon, made out for him by an obliging provincial scholar.
[Illustration: THE FREEMEN'S TRIBUNAL By Benjamin Vautier]
Well, then, I shall stay here among the peasants until old Jochem sends me news of Schrimbs or Peppel. To be sure, in the course of my eighty-mile journey I have cooled down a little, for it makes considerable difference when two weeks intervene between a project and its execution. Furthermore the question now is: What sort of revenge shall I take on him? But all that will take care of itself later on.
Mentor, you shall soon hear more, I hope, from your Not-Telemachus.