68 THE SALT OF MY LIFE 



botanising rambles were also fascinating, but 

 the resulting hours with the microscope, when 

 lovely flowers were vivisected and their fragments 

 labelled with appalling designations that sounded 

 like Homeric oaths, put me out of conceit with 

 academic botany. When neither attending lectures 

 nor fishing, I was acquiring a wide range of 

 idiomatic German,, salon and cellar alike contribu- 

 ting to a vocabulary that has since served me at 

 odd times ; learning how to ride bareback in a 

 manege presided over by a rough but most efficient 

 ex-Uhlan for instructor ; or dreaming away the 

 days in a little boat that I kept on the further 

 side of the river, whence I would look up from 

 some puzzling passage in the Leiden des Jungen 

 Werthers or Wahlverwandtschaften to watch the 

 sunbeams move along the Lutheran spires of that 

 pious Hanseatic burgh. Now and again, the 

 University would hold me for a week of days, or 

 growing confidence in the saddle would lend 

 delight to long rides over pitiless white chaussees, 

 past farmhouse and barracks, between endless 

 fields marked only by heaps of stones, since your 

 Mecklenburger dreads hedges as harbouring both 

 birds and insects hostile to agriculture. Econo- 

 mically perhaps he has reason on his side ; but oh, 

 the horror of that unbroken landscape ! 



On the whole, however, that lair among the 

 sighing reeds was first favourite, though on days 



