at his listeners were delighted
with his speeches and assertions and stories, and believed them as
implicitly as he did himself. Sheila, sitting at a distance, saw and
heard, and could not help recalling many an evening in the far North
when Lavender used to fascinate every one around him by the infection
of his warm and poetic enthusiasm. How he talked, too--telling
the stones of these quaint and pathetic ballads in his own
rough--and--ready translations--while there was no self-consciousness
in his face, but a thorough warmth of earnestness; and sometimes, too,
she would notice a quiver of the under lip that she knew of old,
when some pathetic point or phrase had to be indicated rather than
described. He was drawing pictures for them as well as telling
stories--of the three students entering the room in which the
landlady's daughter lay dead--of Barbarossa in his cave--of the
child who used to look up at Heine as he passed her in the street,
awestricken by his pale and strange face--of the last of the band of
companions who sat in the solitary room in which they had sat, and
drank to their memory--of the king of Thule, and the deserter from
Strasburg, and a thousand others.

"But is there any of them--is there anything in the world--more
pitiable than that pilgrimage to Kevlaar?" he said. "You know it, of
course. No? Oh, you must, surely. Don't you remember the mother who
stood by the bedside of her sick son, and asked him whether he would
not rise to see the great procession go by the window; and he tells
her that he cannot, he is so ill: his heart is breaking for thinking
of his dead Gretchen? _You_ know the story, Sheila. The mother begs
him to rise and come with her, and they will join the band of pilgrims
going to Kevlaar, to be healed there of their wounds by the Mother of
God. Then you find them at Kevlaar, and all the maimed and the lame
people have come to the shrine; and whichever limb is diseased, they
make a waxen image of that and lay it on the altar, and then they are
healed. Well, the mother of this poor lad takes wax and forms a heart
out of it, and says to her son, 'Take that to the Mother of God, and
she will heal your pain.' Sighing, he takes the wax heart in his hand,
and, sighing, he goes to the shrine; and there, with tears running
down his face, he says, 'O beautiful Queen of Heaven, I am come to
tell you my grief. I lived with my mother in Cologne: near us lived
Gretchen, who is dead now. Bles