The caravaners Author:Elizabeth Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: you see, merely a term of recognition in the gentleman's country. You can't reasonably object to that, you know. Drive on like a sensible man, and get your fare.... more »" And lifting his hat to Edelgard he continued his passing by. Well, we did finally arrive at the appointed place — indeed, my hearers next winter will know all the time that we must have, or why should I be reading this aloud ? — after being forced by the flyman to walk the last twenty minutes up a hill which, he declared, his horse would not otherwise be able to ascend. The sun shone its hottest while we slowly surmounted this last obstacle — a hard one to encounter when it is long past dinner-time. I am aware that by English clocks it was not past it, but what was that to me ? My watch showed that in Storchwerder, the place our inner natures were used to, it was half-past two, a good hour beyond the time at which they are accustomed daily to be replenished, and no arbitrary theory, anyhow no perilously near approach to one, will convince a man against the evidence of his senses that he is not hungry because a foreign clock says it is not dinner-time when it is. Panthers, we found on reaching the top of the hill and pausing to regain our composure, is but a house here and a house there scattered over a bleak, ungenial landscape. It seemed an odd, high up district to use as a terminus for caravans, and I looked down the steep, narrow lane we had just ascended and wondered how a caravan would get up it. Afterward I found that they never do get up it, but arrive home from the exactly opposite direction along a fair road which was the one any but an imbecile driver would have brought us. We reached our destination by, so to speak, its back door; and we were still standing on the top of the hill doing what is know...« less