the deck. Everything lying heavily
upon Frederick's soul in chaos and struggle melted away before the
seriousness, the simplicity, the innocence of this music. It brought
back memories of his boyhood, of many a morning full of innocence,
expectation, and anticipations of great happiness; Sundays, holidays, his
father's and his mother's birthdays, when the chorus of a regimental song
woke him up in the morning. What was to-day compared with that past? What
lay in between! What a sum of useless work, disenchantment, recognition
bitterly paid for, possession snatched after passionately and then lost,
love trickled away, passion trickled away; how many meetings and hard
partings; what an amount of wrestling with everything in general and in
particular; how much purity of purpose dragged in the mud; how much
striving for freedom and self-determination, resulting only in impotent,
blind imprisonment.

Was he really a person of so much importance before God that He visited
him with such bitter, refined chastisements?

"I'm wild!" screamed Hans Fuellenberg, who appeared at the entrance to the
companionway. "I won't put up with it, or else I'll go insane."

Nevertheless, Hans Fuellenberg and Frederick and all the other passengers,
though in the last degree exhausted, terrorized, desperate, expecting
each moment to be their last, lived through the same awful strain, from
hour to hour, from morning till evening, and from evening till morning
again.

To most of them it seemed impossible to hold out an hour longer. Yet
there were to be three days more of it, they were told, before the
_Roland_ reached New York.

XLVI

Monday brought some sunshine, but no diminution of the tempest. It was
fearful. Everything on deck not nailed or riveted was removed. The cries
at regular intervals piercing the struggling vessel from the steerage
more resembled the bellowing of beasts under the knife of the slaughterer
than human sounds. Monday night was one prolonged agony. Nobody, unless
unconscious from weakness or the tortures of seasickness, closed an eye.

At dawn Tuesday morning, each first-class passenger was startled by the
word, "Danger!" quietly uttered at his cabin door by a steward.

Frederick had been lying a while on his bed dressed, when his steward
opened the door and according to instructions gravely pronounced the one
word, "Danger." At the same time the herald of this message, as fraught
with large significance as