"I sent him up to the castle with the Schneiderlein and Yellow
Lorentz," answered the father. "I shall have ado enough on foot with
thee before we are up the Ladder."

The father and daughter were meantime proceeding along a dark path
through oak and birch woods, constantly ascending, until the oak grew
stunted and disappeared, and the opening glades showed steep, stony,
torrent-furrowed ramparts of hillside above them, looking to
Christina's eyes as if she were set to climb up the cathedral side
like a snail or a fly. She quite gasped for breath at the very
sight, and was told in return to wait and see what she would yet say
to the Adlerstreppe, or Eagle's Ladder. Poor child! she had no
raptures for romantic scenery; she knew that jagged peaks made very
pretty backgrounds in illuminations, but she had much rather have
been in the smooth meadows of the environs of Ulm. The Danube looked
much more agreeable to her, silver-winding between its green banks,
than did the same waters leaping down with noisy voices in their
stony, worn beds to feed the river that she only knew in his grave
breadth and majesty. Yet, alarmed as she was, there was something in
the exhilaration and elasticity of the mountain air that gave her an
entirely new sensation of enjoyment and life, and seemed to brace her
limbs and spirits for whatever might be before her; and, willing to
show herself ready to be gratified, she observed on the freshness and
sweetness of the air.

"Thou find'st it out, child? Ay, 'tis worth all the feather-beds and
pouncet-boxes in Ulm; is it not? That accursed Italian fever never
left me till I came up here. A man can scarce draw breath in your
foggy meadows below there. Now then, here is the view open. What