r return of a hundred or a hundred and twenty thousand
marks a year. Paul had long ago been in a position to make use of his
right of purchase on the estate, and had acquired about two thousand
acres of adjoining marsh lands beside, though at a considerably higher
price, and was now the owner of a well-rounded estate of twelve
thousand acres, the admiration and pride of the whole neighborhood. He
had converted the cultivation of the marshland, which six years ago had
been but a bold theory, into an established scientific fact, and his
methods, the excellence of which was amply proved by his almost
tropically luxuriant harvests and uninterruptedly increasing wealth,
were assiduously imitated on all sides. Paul Haber was acknowledged far
and wide to be the first authority on the management of marsh land. The
government had long since taken note of his success and kept an eye
upon his doings, and was furnished by the Landrath with regular
accounts of his agricultural progress. Young men of the best county
families contended for the privilege of being under him for a year's
practical farming. Foreign governments sent professors, lecturers, and
practical agriculturists to him, partly to inspect his arrangements,
partly to study his methods under his personal supervision, in order to
adopt them in their own countries. Paul was more than a landed
proprietor, he was a kind of professor holding his unpretentious
lecture in the open air or in the appropriately decorated smoking-room
of the Priesenmoor house, always surrounded by a troop of eager and
admiring listeners of various nationalities, and mostly of high rank.

Of course, under these circumstances there was no lack of outward marks
of distinction. Two years before he had been promoted to a first
lieutenancy of the Landwehr. A row of foreign decorations adorned his
breast, and last year, when he was visited by the Minister for
Agriculture, accompanied by the Landrath, the Kronen Order of the
fourth class was added to the rest. Paul was on the District Committee
and County Council, and if he was not deputy of the Landtag and member
of the Reichstag, it was only because he considered all parliamentary
work a barren expenditure of time and strength. He stood in high repute
in the county, which was proved by his election to be the president of
the Society for the Cultivation of Moors and Marshes, a society founded
by his followers and admirers, and which counted among its membe