it--Sommerau--Summer Meadow. The very next station is mine!"

And, as the train ran downhill with brakes on and steam shut off, he put
his head out of the window and one by one saw the old familiar landmarks
in the dusk. They stared at him like dead faces in a dream. Queer, sharp
feelings, half poignant, half sweet, stirred in his heart.

"There's the hot, white road we walked along so often with the two
Brüder always at our heels," he thought; "and there, by Jove, is the
turn through the forest to '_Die Galgen_,' the stone gallows where they
hanged the witches in olden days!"

He smiled a little as the train slid past.

"And there's the copse where the Lilies of the Valley powdered the
ground in spring; and, I swear,"--he put his head out with a sudden
impulse--"if that's not the very clearing where Calame, the French boy,
chased the swallow-tail with me, and Bruder Pagel gave us half-rations
for leaving the road without permission, and for shouting in our mother
tongues!" And he laughed again as the memories came back with a rush,
flooding his mind with vivid detail.

The train stopped, and he stood on the grey gravel platform like a man
in a dream. It seemed half a century since he last waited there with
corded wooden boxes, and got into the train for Strassbourg and home
after the two years' exile. Time dropped from him like an old garment
and he felt a boy again. Only, things looked so much smaller than his
memory of them; shrunk and dwindled they looked, and the distances
seemed on a curiously smaller scale.