with lifeless features and paralyzed arms. For him, who
had relied on "Fortune," and behaved like a fool, they felt no pity, no
compassion, they would not lend their aid.

But soon his former energy returned and with it the power to lift his
soul in prayer. He regained them during the torture, on the rack.

Weeks, months elapsed. Ulrich still remained in the gloomy cell, loaded
with chains, scantily fed on bread and water, constantly looking death in
the face; but a fresh, beautiful spirit of defiance and firm
determination to live animated the youth, who was now at peace with
himself. On the rack he had regained the right to respect himself, and
striven to win the master's praise, the approval of the living and his
beloved dead.

The wounds on his poor, crushed, mangled hands and feet still burned. The
physician had seen them, and when they healed, shook his head in
amazement.

Ulrich rejoiced in his scars, for on the rack and in the Spanish boot, on
nails, and the pointed bench, in the iron necklace and with the stifling
helmet on his head, he had resolutely refused to betray through whom and
whither the master had escaped.

They might come back, burn and spear him; but through him they should
surely learn nothing, nothing at all. He was scarcely aware that he had a
right to forgiveness; yet he felt he had atoned.

Now he could think of the past again. The Holy Virgin once more wore his
lost mother's features; his father, Ruth, Pellicanus, Moor looked kindly
at him. But the brightest light shone into his soul through the darkness
of the dungeon, when he thought of art and his last work. It stood before
him distinctly in brilliant hues, feature for feature, as on the canvas;
he esteemed himself happy in having painted it, and would willingly have
gone to the rack once, twice, thrice, if he could merely have obtained
the certainty of creating other pictures like this, and perhaps still
nobler, more beautiful ones.

Art! Art! Perhaps this was the "word," and if not, it was the highest,
most exquisite, most precious thing in life, beside which everything else
seemed small, pitiful and insipid. With what other word could God have
created the world, human beings, animals, and plants? The doctor had
often called every flower, every beetle, a work of art, and Ulrich now
understood his meaning, and could imagine how the Almighty, with the
thirst for creation and plastic hand of the greatest of all artists had
formed t