nder had spoken so long that the vibration
of his deep voice and the thoughts it uttered had melted into one.

"'Halting and with difficulty, as though from inward depths clumsily
fumbling for words, he always arrived at the same goal. The thought was
at last as clear and lucid as a birch leaf held against the sunlight.'"

"Was it then----"

"No, don't interrupt me! 'Karl Mander often seemed to me as unlike all
other people as though he belonged to a different order of things. He
was not like an individual, he represented a race. He swept by like a
mighty river: at the mercy of chance and natural obstacles, perhaps,
but ever rolling on. So was he, both in life and in speech. Neither was
his voice merely individual, it had in it the reverberation of a
torrent--a melancholy, captivating harmony, but monotonous,
unceasing.'"

"That surely is what the sea sounds like, mother?"

The mother was as much carried away by her memories as animated in her
movements, as eager in her glance as a young girl. Now she stopped.

"Like the sea, do you say? No, no, no, not like the sea. The sea is
only an eye. No, dear, not like the sea; there were warm depths and
hiding-places in his nature such as the sea has not. One had a sense of
intimate security and comfort with him. He was capable of the most
self-forgetting devotion. Listen further. 'Karl Mander was chosen,' he
wrote, 'chosen as a forerunner before the people's own time should
come--chosen because he was good and blameless; his message to futurity
was not soiled in his soul.'"

"That is beautiful."

"Child, can you imagine how I was carried away? I had had a vague
feeling that the surroundings of my life were unreal; here was
something that was real.

"And he himself! We women do not love that which is lofty merely
because it is lofty; no, there must be a certain weakness
too--something that appeals to our help; we must feel a mission. And
you cannot conceive how powerful and yet powerless he was."

"How powerless, mother?"

"Well, when he came--in that condition----"

"Yes, of course."

"And his way of expressing himself. He never found the right words
first, he stopped and changed them even as they poured out. And, in the
meantime, if he caught something up in his hand he stood there with it.
If it were the tumbler--and it generally was--he grasped it tightly,
and so, because of it, would keep his hand still for a quarter of an
hour at a time. His personality wa