Finkelstein, like many another German, resembled a weak edition of Bismarck. A little way off the appearance was remarkable. Closer, of course, one saw the softness of eye and indecision of jaw that destroyed the illusion. “I want you to fearful be⁠—of nozzing,” be said, looking the young man up and down. “I am afraid of nothing,” said Arthur Spinrobin, believing that the secretaryship was already his. “Goot,” said the old professor, “I take you on!” And thus Arthur Spinrobin, orphan, penniless, the money provided for his Cambridge education just completed, began the high adventure of his life by a three months’ engagement to Professor Adolf Finkelstein. The only qualification was that he should know German, have some knowledge of surveying, and be “afraid of nothing.” Finkelstein, for reasons best known to himself, lived at the time in a little farmhouse of grey stone among the folds of the Dorsetshire hills; and thither Spinrobin, small, round and active, with cheerful face and sanguine heart, betook himself, as agreed, on 1st September, “It may lead to something,” he said to himself at the end of the first week; “but it’s all jolly queer. I wonder if the old boy is a spy⁠—or merely a lunatic.” He remembered that he was expected to be afraid of nothing. Arrest, high treason, and other ominous words occurred to him; but in the end he rejected them all. “He’s one of these Teutonic dreamers⁠—transcendentalist and all that⁠—gone a little bit cracky.” Only the map-making puzzled him⁠—uneasily. For the life they led was not quite ordinary. They had a big sitting room and a bedroom each in the farmhouse that was glad enough to take a couple of boarders. The mornings they spent translating various German passages, beginning with authors like Novalis and Schlegel, and ending with more modern writers that Spinrobin had never heard of. While Finkelstein translated into French, Spinrobin did likewise into English⁠—apparently with a view to simultaneous publication in both languages of some big Essay the German professor was at work on. This Essay was to include these passages, but Finkelstein did not take the secretary into his confidence concerning it. There was an air of mystery about the whole thing. And the translated passages always had to do with the one subject, viz., that the Earth was the body of a great Being⁠—living, conscious; that it had organs and a physiognomy; that the beauty of nature was merely a revelation of its personality; and that human beings could no more realise this than a fly on an elephant could realise that it walked upon a living body differing from its own merely in size and habits. “Some faces are too big to be seen as faces,” Finkelstein said one morning to him. Then leaning forward through the tobacco smoke above their work table he suddenly touched Spinrobin’s little turn-up nose with his thick finger. “The ten million microbes there dwelling,” he said with an earnestness that made the secretary start, “do not know they are on a human face, was?” For he talked German and English indiscriminately. The afternoons they walked together upon the hills, Spinrobin in normal shooting costume, and Finkelstein in baggy grey knickerbockers, elastic-side boots with nails, a loose jacket of Austrian Loden cloth, and a Tyrolese hat. A camera was swung round his shoulder, for he took frequent photographs, which he developed himself. “Look,” he said, pointing, to the smooth, rounded hilltops about him, treeless, with sheep and cattle feeding in groups. “The cheeks of a great face⁠—see, I photograph it now, and later show you somezing your own little sight cannot take in. Ach! the camera is fine for that. Wer weisst? Wer weisst?”⁠ ⁠… But the chalk pits drew him most, and he was forever taking photographs or making sketches of them, and asking his secretary to draw accurate plans showing the exact relation they bore to one another; and poring over the results on paper at home till the smoke got too thick to see, and he would put them away, with a sigh and discuss plans for the morrow. In particular there were two pits about a mile apart that interested him, with a third some hundreds of feet below them, very deep, with, a ragged edge whose gorse and furze bushes grew in a fringe along the lips. “There, we have it, I think,” he used to say in German, after wandering for hours from one to the other, and studying endless photographs and plans of them at home. “There, we have it.