Together by Norman Douglas — Read

Afternoon, and warmer than usual. Fön shifts about in irresolute, vagrant puffs of heat; the sky, shortly before sunrise, had been flaring red, copper-colored, from end to end. This is the ardent and wayward but caressing wind under whose touch everything grows brittle and inflammable; when in olden days all cooking had to be suspended and fires extinguished; when whole villages, for some trifling reason, were burnt to the ground; it was during Fön weather that Tiefis and Nüziders, and several in the Rhine valley, were annihilated within the memory of our fathers.[8] The peasants, unfamiliar with real heat, go about gasping.

While crossing our cemetery to revisit the grave of a little brother of my father's, an infant, and the Catholics were kind enough to make room for him here -- it struck me how poetic are the German designations for such sad spots, _Friedhof_ and _Gottesacker_, when contrasted with our soul-withering "churchyard" or "graveyard" or "burial-ground. " The people hereabouts contrive to invest with a halo of romance even that most unromantic of objects, the common potato, by calling it _Erdapfel_, or _Grundbirne_. And the names of the ruined castles that strew this region, Schattenburg, Sonnenberg, Rosenegg, and so forth, were surely invented by a race that had a fine feeling for such things.