My uncle, Bernard Hertzog, the historian and antiquary, with his grand three-cornered hat and , and with a long iron-shod mountain-pole firmly grasped in his hand, was coming down one evening by the Luppersberg, hailing every turn in the landscape with enthusiastic .
Years had never in him the love of knowledge. At sixty he was still at work upon his History of Alsacian , and never allowed himself to write a complete account of a ruined and defaced monument, or any of former days, until he had examined it a hundred times from every point of view.
"No man," said he, "who has had the happy privilege of being born in the Vosges, between Haut Bar, Nideck, and Geierstein has any business to think of travelling. Where are there nobler forests, older fir and trees, more lovely smiling valleys, wilder rocks? Where is the country with richer possessions in story? Here, in olden times, used the high and powerful lords of Lutzelstein, Dagsberg, Leiningen, and Fénétrange, to fight clad in mail from head to foot. Here the son of the Church and the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire exchanged blows in the Middle Ages with swords two yards long. What are our wars compared with those terrible battles where fought hand to hand, where they hammered upon each other's with huge battle-axes, and drove the between the bars of the closed visor? Were not those heroic of arms? was not that a courage worthy to be chronicled to all ? But our young people want to see new things; they are not satisfied with their own native land: they must wander through Germany, make tours in France. Worse still, they abandon science and its noble fields for trade, arts, industry, as if there had not been in the former glorious days much more curious industrial arts and pursuits than in our own day! Witness the Hanseatic League, the enterprise of Venice, Genoa, and the Levant, Flemish manufactures, Florentine art, the triumphs in art of Rome and Antwerp! No! all that is laid aside; people now-a-days pride themselves upon their ignorance of those glorious days; above all, they neglect our dear old Alsace. Now, , Theodore, don't all those tourists remind you of husbands leaving their fair sweet wives to run after ugly coquettes?"
And Bernard Hertzog shook his learned head, his eyes rounded with wonder and excitement, just as if he had been before the ruins of Babylon.
His partiality to the usages and customs of old times accounted for his having, for forty years past, worn the full-skirted plush coat, the breeches, the black silk stockings, and the silver shoe-buckles of our grandfathers. He would have thought himself disgraced had he put on trousers; and to cut off his pigtail would have been a deed.
So the worthy chronicler was going to Haslach on the 3rd of July, 1835, to examine with his own eyes a little bronze Mercury recently in the old of the Augustins.
He on with a tolerably stop under a burning sun. Mountains succeeded mountains, valleys sank into other valleys, the went up, then went down again, turned, now to the right, now to the left, until Maître Hertzog began to wonder how it was that he had not caught sight of the village an hour ago.
The fact was that after leaving Saverne he had inclined to the right, and was now into the Dagsberg woods with energy. At the rate he was going, in five or six hours he would have reached Phramond, eight leagues from his destination. But night was coming on apace, and the path was now becoming fainter, and under the tall trees only an indistinct track appeared.
The approach of night among the mountains is a sight; the shadows in the valleys, the sun withdraws, one by one, his rays from the darkening , the silence deepens every minute. You look behind you; the groups and of trees assume proportions; a blackbird at the summit of a tree bids farewell to the parting day, then silence covers all like a funeral . You can only hear now the last year's dead leaves crisping under foot, and far, far, away a waterfall filling the valley with its hum. Bernard Hertzog began to pant a little; his clothes adhered to his skin with the running . His legs were beginning to give hints of surrendering.
"Confound that foolish Mercury!" he cried. "At this moment I ought to have been quiet at home in my own arm-chair, and Berbel, according to her praiseworthy custom, ought to be bringing me up upon a tray a cup of smoking hot coffee, while I am up my chapter upon the ancient armoury at Nideck. Instead of which, here I am floundering in holes, stumbling everywhere, and suppose I lost my way altogether and then broke my neck! There!—I said so! Was that a tree I knocked against? A hundred thousand bans and maledictions fall upon Mercury and Haas, the architect, who sent for me to look at it! and the scoundrels, too, who dug it up! I'll lay any that the boasted Mercury is nothing but some defaced and bit of stone, without either nose or legs—some shapeless deformity like that little Hesus last year at Marienthal. Oh, you architects! you architects!—you are always finding antiquities everywhere. Luckily I had not my spectacles on, or I should have smashed them against that tree; but now I shall be obliged to find a bed somewhere among the bushes. What a road this is!—nothing but ruts, and holes, and pits, and loose rocks and !"
In one of those moments when the good man, getting , was stopping for breath, he thought he could hear the grating of a saw far down the valley. What was his joy when he became certain that it was that!
"Heaven be praised!" he cried, plucking up his spirits; "now to push on with halting steps. Now I shall get a little rest. What a lesson this will be for me! had upon my . What an old fool to go and expose myself to have to lie out in the woods at my time of life, to ruin my health and undermine my constitution! I shall remember this! Never shall I forget this warning!"
In a quarter of an hour the noise of falling water became more distinct; then a faint light broke through the trees. Maître Bernard then found himself at the top of the wood; he observed below the heath a stream running down the winding valley as far as he could see, and just before him the saw............