it, when a white goat came to distract my attention, followed at a
distance by a little girl whom I suspected of being very pretty;
but I forgot them both in watching a steamboat passing up the river
towing a flotilla of barges, covered with awnings and attended by
their lighters, and a huge raft laden with timber from the Black
Forest, manned by fifty or sixty boatmen, some of whom in front,
and some in the rear, directed its course with vigorous strokes of
the oar.

"But what pleases me above everything else is, that Geierfels, by
its position, is a kind of acoustic focus to which all the noises
of the valley incessantly ascend. This afternoon, the dull
murmuring of the river, the panting respiration of the tug-boat,
the vibration of a bell in a distant church tower, the song of a
peasant girl washing her linen in a spring, the bleating of sheep,
the tic tac of the mills, the tinkling bells of a long train of
mules drawing a barge by a rope, the reverberating clamors of
boatmen stowing casks in their boats--all these various sounds came
to my ear in vibrations of surprising clearness, when suddenly a
gust of wind mingled them confusedly together, and I could hear but
a vague music which seemed to fall from the skies. But a moment
afterwards all of these vibrating voices emerged anew from the
whirlwind of confused harmony, and each, sonorous and distinct,
recounted to my enraptured heart some episode in the life of man
and nature. And then, when night comes, Madame, to all of these
noises of the day succeed others more mysterious, more penetrating,
more melancholy. Do you like the hooting of the owl, Madame? But
first, I wonder if you have ever heard it. It is a cry-- No, it
is not a cry, it is a soft, stifled wail; a monotonous and resigned
sorrow, which unbosoms itself to the moon and stars. One of these