notion of it." What was Ingigerd to him now? A matter of indifference.
Shaking his head, he admitted that he now had only the narrowest concern
for himself. What a beautiful hope to escape that brutal fate and land on
some shore! Any fragment of land, any island, any city, any snow-clad
village was a garden of Eden, an improbable dream of happiness. How
extravagantly grateful he would be in the future merely to tread dry
land, merely to draw breath, merely to see a lively street! He gnashed
his teeth. Of what avail a cry for help here? How could a man find God's
ear here? If the extreme thing were to happen, and the _Roland_ with its
mass of human beings were to founder, one would see things that would
prevent the man that had seen them, even if he escaped, from ever being
happy again.

"I would not witness it," thought Frederick. "I would jump overboard to
avoid the sight of it. And while that would be happening, none of my
friends and relatives would be thinking of me at all. 'The steamship
_Roland_ sunk' appears as a head-line in the newspapers. 'Oh!' says the
reader in Berlin, the reader in Hamburg, and Amsterdam. He takes a sip
of coffee, puffs at his cigar, and comfortably settles back to a taste of
more details of the catastrophe, whether observed or fabricated. What a
hurrah for the newspaper publishers! A sensation! More readers! That is
the Medusa into whose eyes we look, and who tells us what the genuine
value of a cargo of human lives is in the world."

Frederick attempted in vain to battle against a still-life picture,
which the _Roland_, valiantly struggling onward, with its siren almost
stifled in the storm, showed him at the bottom of the sea. He saw the
majestic vessel in a coffin of glass. Across its decks swarms of fish
swam hither and thither. Its cabins were all filled with water. The
large dining-room, with its panels of walnut, its tables, and
leather-upholstered revolving chairs, was filled with water. A big polyp,
jelly-fish, and red, mushroom-like sea-anemones had penetrated into the
very gangways along which the passengers were now walking. And to
Frederick's horror, the liveried corpses of Pfundner, the head-steward,
and his assistant stewards were slowly floating about in a circle. The
picture would have been almost ridiculous, had it not been so gruesome
and had it not so certainly lain in the realm of the possible. Think of
all the things divers report! All the things they have seen in th