Harold Macgrath

The Goose Girl Harold Macgrath

An old man, clothed in picturesque patches and tatters, paused and leaned on his stout oakstaff. He was tired. He drew off his rusty felt hat, swept a sleeve across his forehead, andsighed. He had walked many miles that day, and even now the journey's end, near as itreally was, seemed far away. Ah, but he would sleep soundly that night, whether the bedwere of earth or of straw. His peasant garb rather enhanced his fine head. His eyes wereblue and clear and far-seeing, the eyes of a hunter or a woodsman, of a man who watchesthe shadows in the forest at night or the dim, wavering lines on the horizon at daytime;things near or far or roundabout. His brow was high, his nose large and bridged; a face ofmore angles than contours, bristling with gray spikes, like one who has gone unshavenseveral days. His hands, folded over the round, polished knuckle of his staff, were tannedand soiled, but they were long and slender, and the callouses were pink, a certain indicationthat they were fresh. The afternoon glow of the September sun burned along the dusty white highway. Fromwhere he stood the road trailed off miles behind and wound up five hundred feet or moreabove him to the ancient city of Dreiberg. It was not a steep road, but a long and weary one, a steady, enervating, unbroken climb. To the left the mighty cliff reared its granite side tothe hanging city, broke in a wide plain, and then went on up several thousand feet to theledges of dragon-green ice and snow. To the right sparkled and flashed a wild mountainstream on its way to the broad, fertile valley, which, mistily green and brown and yellowwith vineyards and hops and corn, spread out and on to the north, stopping abruptly at thebase of the more formidable chain of mountains