That was over thirty years ago, when he was a dreamy and impressionable
youth of fifteen; and now, as the train climbed slowly up the winding
mountain gorges, his mind travelled back somewhat lovingly over the
intervening period, and forgotten details rose vividly again before him
out of the shadows. The life there had been very wonderful, it seemed to
him, in that remote mountain village, protected from the tumults of the
world by the love and worship of the devout Brotherhood that ministered
to the needs of some hundred boys from every country in Europe. Sharply
the scenes came back to him. He smelt again the long stone corridors,
the hot pinewood rooms, where the sultry hours of summer study were
passed with bees droning through open windows in the sunshine, and
German characters struggling in the mind with dreams of English
lawns--and then the sudden awful cry of the master in German--

"Harris, stand up! You sleep!"

And he recalled the dreadful standing motionless for an hour, book in
hand, while the knees felt like wax and the head grew heavier than a
cannon-ball.

The very smell of the cooking came back to him--the daily _Sauerkraut_,
the watery chocolate on Sundays, the flavour of the stringy meat served
twice a week at _Mittagessen_; and he smiled to think again of the
half-rations that was the punishment for speaking English. The very
odour of the milk-bowls,--the hot sweet aroma that rose from the soaking
peasant-bread at the six-o'clock breakfast,--came back to him pungently,
and he saw the huge _Speisesaal_ with the hundred boys in their school
uniform, all eating sleepily in silence, gulping down the coarse bread
and scalding milk in terror of the bell that would presently cut them
short--and, at the far end where the masters sat, he saw the narrow slit