the recaptured house, I often found
myself in the little tea-arbor of his prosperous nursery. He was frugal,
sober, and industrious; small wonder that in that growing town he waxed
rich, and presently opened a restaurant in the main street, connected
with his market-garden, which became famous. His relations to me
never changed with his changed fortunes; he was always the simple
market-gardener and florist who had aided my first housekeeping, and
stood by me in an hour of need. Of all things regarding himself he was
singularly reticent; I do not think he had any confidants or intimates,
even among his own countrymen, whom I believed to be German. But one day
he quite accidentally admitted he was a Swiss. As a youthful admirer
of the race I was delighted, and told him so, with the enthusiastic
addition that I could now quite understand his independence, with his
devoted adherence to another's cause. He smiled sadly, and astonished me
by saying that he had not heard from Switzerland since he left six years
ago. He did not want to hear anything; he even avoided his countrymen
lest he should. I was confounded.

"But," I said, "surely you have a longing to return to your country; all
Swiss have! You will go back some day just to breathe the air of your
native mountains."

"I shall go back some days," said Rutli, "after I have made mooch, mooch
money, but not for dot air."

"What for, then?"

"For revenge--to get efen."

Surprised, and for a moment dismayed as I was, I could not help
laughing. "Rutli and revenge!" Impossible! And to make it the more
absurd, he was still smoking gently and regarding me with soft,
complacent eyes. So unchanged was his face and manner that he might have
told me he was going back to be married.

"You do not oonderstand," he said forgivingly. "Some days I shall dell
to you id. Id is a story. You shall make it yourselluff for dose babers
dot you write. It is not bretty, berhaps, ain't it, but it is droo. And
de endt is not yet."

Only that Rutli never joked, except in a ponderous fashion with many
involved sentences, I should have thought he was taking a good-humored
rise out of me. But it was not funny. I am afraid I dismissed it from my
mind as a revelation of something weak and puerile, quite inconsistent
with his practical common sense and strong simplicity, and wished he had
not alluded to it. I never asked him to tell me the story. It was a year
later, and only when he had invited m