You can only hear now the
last year's dead leaves crisping under foot, and far, far, away a
waterfall filling the valley with its monotonous hum. Bernard Hertzog
began to pant a little; his clothes adhered to his skin with the running
perspiration. His legs were beginning to give hints of surrendering.
"Confound that foolish Mercury!" he cried. "At this moment I ought to
have been quiet at home in my own arm-chair, and Berbel, according to her
praiseworthy custom, ought to be bringing me up upon a tray a cup of
smoking hot coffee, while I am winding up my chapter upon the ancient
armoury at Nideck. Instead of which, here I am floundering in holes,
stumbling everywhere, and suppose I lost my way altogether and then broke
my neck! There!--I said so! Was that a tree I knocked against? A hundred
thousand bans and maledictions fall upon Mercury and Haas, the architect,
who sent for me to look at it! and the scoundrels, too, who dug it up!
I'll lay any wager that the boasted Mercury is nothing but some defaced
and corroded bit of stone, without either nose or legs--some shapeless
deformity like that little Hesus last year at Marienthal.
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