enderly with a sort of boyish delight.

Almost timorously he pulled the rope and listened with a tremor of
excitement to the clanging of the bell deep within the building. And the
long-forgotten sound brought the past before him with such a vivid sense
of reality that he positively shivered. It was like the magic bell in
the fairy-tale that rolls back the curtain of Time and summons the
figures from the shadows of the dead. He had never felt so sentimental
in his life. It was like being young again. And, at the same time, he
began to bulk rather large in his own eyes with a certain spurious
importance. He was a big man from the world of strife and action. In
this little place of peaceful dreams would he, perhaps, not cut
something of a figure?

"I'll try once more," he thought after a long pause, seizing the iron
bell-rope, and was just about to pull it when a step sounded on the
stone passage within, and the huge door slowly swung open.

A tall man with a rather severe cast of countenance stood facing him in
silence.

"I must apologise--it is somewhat late," he began a trifle pompously,
"but the fact is I am an old pupil. I have only just arrived and really
could not restrain myself." His German seemed not quite so fluent as
usual. "My interest is so great. I was here in '70."

The other opened the door wider and at once bowed him in with a smile of
genuine welcome.

"I am Bruder Kalkmann," he said quietly in a deep voice. "I myself was a
master here about that time. It is a great pleasure always to welcome a
former pupil." He looked at him very keenly for a few seconds, and then
added, "I think, too, it is splendid of you to come--very splendid."

"It is a very great pleasure," Harris replied, delighted with his
reception.

The dimly lighted corridor with its flooring of grey stone, and the
familiar sound of a German voice echoing through it,--with the peculiar
intonation the Brothers always used in speaking,--all combined to lift
him bodily, as it were, into the dream-atmosphere of long-forgotten
days. He stepped gladly into the building and the door shut with the
familiar thunder that completed the reconstruction of the past. He
almost felt the old sense of imprisonment, of aching nostalgia, of
having lost his liberty.

Harris sighed involuntarily and turned towards his host, who returned
his smile faintly and then led the way down the corridor.

"The boys have retired," he explained, "and, as you rememb