hours before. At any rate it was left to the servant with the dog to look after the luggage by himself; and while he was doing so his masters drove in two ordinary flies—Mr. Spoelmann with Doctor Watercloose, Miss Spoelmann with the Countess—to the Spa Garden. There they got out, and there for six weeks they led a life the cost of which it did not need all their money to meet.
They were lucky; the weather was fine, it was a blue autumn, a long succession of sunny days from October into November, and Miss Spoelmann rode daily—that was her only luxury—with her companion, on horses which she hired by the week from the livery stables. Mr. Spoelmann did not ride, although the Courier, with obvious reference to him, published a note by its medical colleague according to which riding had a soothing effect in cases of stone, owing to its jolting, and helped to disperse the stone. But the hotel staff knew that the famous man practised artificial riding within the four walls of his room, with the help of a machine, a stationary velocipede to whose saddle a jolting motion was imparted by the working of the pedals.
He was a zealous drinker of the healing waters, the Ditlinde Spring, by which he seemed to set great store. He appeared first thing every morning in the Fiillhaus, accompanied by his daughter, who for her part was quite healthy, and only drank" with him for company's sake, and then, in his faded coat and with his hat pulled over his eyes, took his exercise in the Spa Garden and Wandel-halle, drinking the water the while through a glass tube out of a blue tumbler—watched at a distance by the two American newspaper correspondents, whose duty it was to telegraph to their papers a thousand words daily about Spoelmann's holiday resort, and who were therefore bound to try to get something to telegraph about.
Otherwise he was rarely visible. His illness—kidney
