hroughout this trying interval."

It was now an hour when there is something indescribably sombre about
the country; day was declining, the outlines of the larger objects in
the landscape were becoming less distinct, and the trees were assuming
any sort of fantastical shape that the mind chose to assign to them.
Here and there a bird rustled in the foliage, but otherwise the
silence was only broken by footsteps of the four men.

In ordinary life children quit the parental home by easy and almost
imperceptible gradations. First, there is the school, then college;
next, perhaps, the requirements of the profession they have adopted.
Thus they readily abandon the domestic hearth; friends, intercourse,
and society divide their affection, and the separation from home
rarely, if ever, costs them a pang. Not so with Becker's two sons;
their world was New Switzerland; therefore, like the rays of the sun
absorbed by the mirror of Archimedes, all their affections were
concentrated on one point.

On the former occasion when the family ties were on the eve of being
rent asunder, the case was very different. It is true, Frank and
Ernest were about to leave for an indefinite period of time; but then,
every comfort that the most fastidious voyager could desire was
awaiting them on board the _Nelson_; for a well-appointed ship is like
a well-appointed inn on shore, all your wants are ministered to with
the utmost celerity. Besides, Captain Littlestone had taken the young
men under his special protection, and had promised to see them
properly introduced and cared for in Europe. How dissimilar was the
position of Fritz and his brother; they were about to tumble into the
old world should they be so fortunate as to reach it, much as if they
had dropped from the skies, without a guide and without a friend. They
were about to entrust themselves to the ocean, separated from its
treacherous floods by a few wretched planks; to be exposed for months,
almost unsheltered, to wind, rain, and the mercy of pitiless storms.

"If God in His mercy preserves you, my sons," said Becker, breaking at
last the silence, "you will find yourselves launched in an ocean still
more turbulent than that you have escaped--an ocean where falsehood
and cunning assume the names of policy and tact; where results always
justify the means, whatever these may be; where everything is
sacrificed to personal interest and ambition; where fortune is honored
as a virtue that d