Americans and English; and we Germans must
desert our native land to partake of it."

"And was it not hard to leave?" asked Stephen, gently.

The eyes of the German filled at the recollection, nor did he seem
ashamed of his tears.

"I had a poor old father whose life was broken to save the Vaterland,
but not his spirit," he cried, "no, not that. My father was born
in 1797. God directed my grandfather to send him to the Kolnisches
gymnasium, where the great Jahn taught. Jahn was our Washington, the
father of Germany that is to be.

"Then our Fatherland was French. Our women wore Parisian clothes, and
spoke the language; French immorality and atheism had spread like a
plague among us Napoleon the vile had taken the sword of our Frederick
from Berlin. It was Father Jahn (so we love to call him), it was Father
Jahn who founded the 'Turnschulen', that the generations to come might
return to simple German ways,--plain fare, high principles, our native
tongue; and the development of the body. The downfall of the fiend
Napoleon and the Vaterland united--these two his scholars must have
written in their hearts. All summer long, in their black caps and linen
pantaloons, they would trudge after him, begging a crust here and a
cheese there, to spread his teachings far and wide under the thatched
roofs.

"Then came 1811. I have heard my father tell how in the heat of that
year a great red comet burned in the sky, even as that we now see, my
friend. God forbid that this portends blood. But in the coming spring
the French conscripts filled our sacred land like a swarm of locusts,
devouring as they went. And at their head, with the pomp of Darius, rode
that destroyer of nations and homes, Napoleon. What was Germany then?
Ashes. But the red embers were beneath, fanned by Father Jahn. Napoleon
at Dresden made our princes weep. Never, even in the days of the
Frankish kings, had we been so humbled. He dragged our young men with
him to Russia, and left them to die moaning on the frozen wastes, while
he drove off in his sledge.

"It was the next year that Germany rose. High and low, rich and poor,
Jaeger and Landwehr, came flocking into the army, and even the old men,
the Landsturm. Russia was an ally, and later, Austria. My father, a last
of sixteen, was in the Landwehr, under the noble Blucher in Silesia,
when they drove the French into the Katzbach and the Neisse, swollen by
the rains into torrents. It had rained until the forests