So he wrote them down exactly as he had heard them himself. Then he
handed them over to Elisabeth, who kept them carefully in a drawer of
her writing-desk, and now and again of an evening when he was present
it afforded him agreeable satisfaction to hear her reading aloud to
her mother these little tales out of the notebooks in which he had
written them.

Seven years had gone by. Reinhard was to leave the town in order to
proceed to his higher education. Elisabeth could not bring herself to
think that there would now be a time to be passed entirely without
Reinhard. She was delighted when he told her one day that he would
continue to write out stories for her as before; he would send them to
her in the letters to his mother, and then she would have to write
back to him and tell him how she liked them.

The day of departure was approaching, but ere it came a good deal more
poetry found its way into the parchment-bound volume. This was the one
secret he kept from Elisabeth, although she herself had inspired the
whole book and most of the songs, which gradually had filled up almost
half of the blank pages.

It was the month of June, and Reinhard was to start on the following
day. It was proposed to spend one more festive day together and
therefore a picnic was arranged for a rather large party of friends in
an adjacent forest.

It was an hour's drive along the road to the edge of the wood, and
there the company took down the provision baskets from the carriages
and walked the rest of the way. The road lay first of all through a