"Come," said the Professor, "what are those animals with tails, that run
up trees?"

We thought for a while, then one of us suggested cats.

This was an error; the poet had said nothing about cats; squirrels was
what the Professor was trying to get.

I do not recall much more about this wood in detail. I only recollect
that the sky was introduced into it. In places where there occurred an
opening among the trees you could by looking up see the sky above you;
very often there were clouds in this sky, and occasionally, if I remember
rightly, the girl got wet.

I have dwelt upon this incident, because it seems to me suggestive of the
whole question of scenery in literature. I could not at the time, I
cannot now, understand why the top boy's summary was not sufficient. With
all due deference to the poet, whoever he may have been, one cannot but
acknowledge that his wood was, and could not be otherwise than, "the
usual sort of a wood."

I could describe the Black Forest to you at great length. I could
translate to you Hebel, the poet of the Black Forest. I could write
pages concerning its rocky gorges and its smiling valleys, its pine-clad
slopes, its rock-crowned summits, its foaming rivulets (where the tidy
German has not condemned them to flow respectably through wooden troughs
or drainpipes), its white villages, its lonely farmsteads.

But I am haunted by the suspicion you might skip all this. Were you