them, he mentioned their names and described their peculiarities.

At last we reached the Keilhau plain, a bowl whose walls formed tolerably
high mountains which surrounded it on all sides except toward Rudolstadt,
where an opening permitted the Schaalbach to wind through meadows and
fields. So the village lies like an egg in a nest open in one direction,
like the beetle in the calyx of a flower which has lost one of its
leaves. Nature has girded it on three sides with protecting walls which
keep the wind from entering the valley, and to this, and the delicious,
crystal-clear water which flows from the mountains into the pumps, its
surprising healthfulness is doubtless due. During my residence there of
four and a half years there was no epidemic disease among the boys, and
on the fiftieth jubilee of the institute, in 1867, which I attended, the
statement was made that during the half century of its existence only one
pupil had died, and he had had heart disease when his parents sent him to
the school.

We must have arrived on Sunday, for we met on the road several peasants
in long blue coats, and peasant women in dark cloth cloaks with gold-
embroidered borders, and little black caps from which ribbons three or
four feet long hung down the wearers' backs. The cloaks descended from
mother to daughter. They were very heavy, yet I afterward saw peasant
women wear them to church in summer.

At last we drove into the broad village street. At the right, opposite
to the first houses, lay a small pond called the village pool, on which
ducks and geese floated, and whose dark surface, glittering with many
hues, reflected the shepherd's hut. After we had passed some very fine
farmhouses, we reached the "Plan," where bright waters plashed into a
stone trough, a linden tree shaded the dancing-ground, and a pretty house