bond between them more firmly.

In the survivors, with the exception of Frederick and Ingigerd, the
consciousness of their newly acquired life soon assumed exuberant forms.
Scarcely two days lay between them and the sinking of the _Roland_, yet
these very people, who had undergone the brutal terrors of that awful
event, abandoned themselves to the greatest gaiety. Arthur Stoss probably
had never before shot off such an incessant fire of jokes and jibes, and
probably never before had set such an audience a-laughing as the captain,
the first mate, the boatswain, Wendler, the ship's cook, Fleischmann,
Doctor Wilhelm, and even Mrs. Liebling, Rosa, Bulke, and the sailors of
the _Roland_ and the _Hamburg_.

Fleischmann involuntarily and unconsciously danced to the tune that Stoss
in perfect good humour intentionally piped. It was most amusing when the
man with black locks, dressed in a black velvet suit saturated with salt
water, swaggeringly passed judgment upon Adolf Menzel, Boecklin,
Liebermann, and other celebrated German masters. In expanding his
theories of painting, he always used his lost treasures as examples.
Stoss never wearied of getting the caddish genius to describe his
paintings, the loss of which in Fleischmann's opinion was the worst
disaster connected with the sinking of the _Roland_. The form that Doctor
Wilhelm's teasing of Fleischmann took was, when Ingigerd was not present,
to make him describe his rescue in detail. In the artist's brain, it was
an event in an eminent degree glorifying to himself. All the sorry
incidents had completely passed from his mind, including the fact that
Rosa, Bulke and Ingigerd had pulled him out of the waves howling like a
wet poodle.

The sum at which he estimated the loss of his pictures and which he
intended to demand of the steamship company was a matter of general
knowledge, like the price of stocks and bonds, within two and a half
days jumping from eight hundred dollars to six thousand. There was no
telling to what amount it might soar.

Fleischmann had contrived to get some writing paper on the _Hamburg_,
and industriously set to work to caricature everybody on board. Thus, he
often bestowed his company unbidden upon Frederick and Ingigerd, who had
no need of anybody else in the world. That would ruffle Frederick's
temper.

"I am surprised," he once said to him, by no means amiably, "that after
so solemn an event, you are capable of such superficial trifling."