not regular. But I met him once more at Ems with a charming wife, and
decidedly happy in his own sphere of activity. These early friendships
form the distant landscape of life on which we like to dwell when the
present ceases to absorb all our thoughts. Our memory dwells on them
as a golden horizon, and there remains a constant yearning which makes
us feel the incompleteness of this life. After all, the number of our
true friends is small; and yet how few even of that small number
remain with us for life. There are other faces and other names that
rise from beyond the clouds which more and more divide us from our
early years.

There were some wild spirits among us who fretted at the narrow-minded
policy which went by the name of the Metternich system. Repression was
the panacea which Metternich recommended to all the governments of
Germany, large and small. No doubt the system of keeping things quiet
secured to Germany and to Europe at large a thirty years' peace, but
it could not prevent the accumulation of inflammable material which,
after several threatenings, burst forth at last in the conflagration
of 1848. Among my friends I remember several who were ready for the
wildest schemes in order to have Germany united, respected abroad,
and under constitutional government at home. Splendid fellows they
were, but they either ended their days within the walls of a prison,
or had to throw up everything and migrate to America. What has become
of them? Some have risen to the surface in America, others have
yielded to the inevitable and become peaceful citizens at home; nay, I
am grieved to say, have even accepted service under Government to spy
on their former friends and fellow-dreamers. But not a few saw the
whole of their life wrecked either in prison or in poverty, though
they had done no wrong, and in many cases were the finest characters
it has been my good fortune to know. They were before their time, the
fruit was not ripe as it was in 1871, but Germany certainly lost some
of her best sons in those miserable years; and if my father escaped
this political persecution, it was probably due to the influence of
the reigning Duke and the Duchess, a Princess of Prussia, who knew
that he was not a dangerous man, and not likely to blow up the German
Diet.

I myself got a taste of prison life for the offence of wearing the
ribbon of a club which the police regarded with disfavour. I cannot
say that either the disgrace or the