



Produced by Laura McDonald (http://www.girlebooks.com) and
Marc D'Hooghe (http:www.freeliterature.org)





THE ADVENTURES OF ELIZABETH IN RUeGEN

BY

THE AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN"


New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.


1904



[Illustration: map of Ruegen]


CONTENTS


THE FIRST DAY--From Miltzow to Lauterbach

THE SECOND DAY--Lauterbach and Vilm

THE THIRD DAY--From Lauterbach to Goehren

THE FOURTH DAY--From Goehren to Thiessow

THE FOURTH DAY (continued)--At Thiessow

THE FIFTH DAY--From Thiessow to Sellin

THE FIFTH DAY (continued)--From Sellin to Binz

THE SIXTH DAY--The Jagdschloss

THE SIXTH DAY (continued)--The Granitz Woods, Schwarze See, and Kiekoewer

THE SEVENTH DAY--From Binz to Stubbenkammer

THE SEVENTH DAY (continued)--At Stubbenkammer

THE EIGHTH DAY--From Stubbenkammer to Glowe

THE NINTH DAY--From Glowe to Wiek

THE TENTH DAY--From Wiek to Hiddensee

THE ELEVENTH DAY--From Wiek Home





THE ADVENTURES OF ELIZABETH IN RUeGEN




THE FIRST DAY

FROM MILTZOW TO LAUTERBACH


Every one who has been to school and still remembers what he was taught
there, knows that Ruegen is the biggest island Germany possesses, and
that it lies in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Pomerania.

Round this island I wished to walk this summer, but no one would walk
with me. It is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the
life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on
anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a
thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside. If you
drive you are bound by a variety of considerations, eight of the most
important being the horses' legs. If you bicycle--but who that loves to
get close to nature would bicycle? And as for motors, the object of a
journey like mine was not the getting to a place but the going there.

Successively did I invite the most likely of my women friends, numbering
at least a dozen, to walk with me. They one and all replied that it
would make them tired and that it would be dull; and when I tried to
remove the first objection by telling them how excellent it would be for
the German nation, especially those portions of it that are still to
come, if its women walked round Ruegen more often, they stared and
smiled; and when I tried to remove the second by explaining that by our
own spirits are we deified, they stared and smiled more than ever.

Walking, then, was out of the question, for I could not walk alone. The
grim monster Conventionality whose iron claws are for ever on my
shoulder, for ever pulling me back from the harmless and the wholesome,
put a stop to that even if I had not been afraid of tramps, which I was.
So I drove, and it was round Ruegen that I drove because one hot
afternoon when I was idling in the library, not reading but fingering
the books, taking out first one and then another, dipping into them,
deciding which I would read next, I came across Marianne North's
_Recollections of a Happy Life_, and hit upon the page where she begins
to talk of Ruegen. Immediately interested--for is not Ruegen nearer to me
than any other island?--I became absorbed in her description of the
bathing near a place called Putbus, of the deliciousness of it in a
sandy cove where the water was always calm, and of how you floated about
on its crystal surface, and beautiful jelly-fish, stars of purest
colours, floated with you. I threw down the book to ransack the shelves
for a guide to Ruegen. On the first page of the first one I found was
this remarkable paragraph:--

'Hearest thou the name Ruegen, so doth a wondrous spell come over thee.
Before thine eyes it rises as a dream of far-away, beauteous fairylands.
Images and figures of long ago beckon thee across to the marvellous
places where in grey prehistoric times they dwelt, and on which they
have left the shadow of their presence. And in thee stirs a mighty
desire to wander over the glorious,