regions from ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea.
I felt as if I were forcing myself up out of the grave. I re-lived my
whole conscious life from my babyhood up to this very day. You can
imagine what a medley it was of nurses, military expeditions, cramming
for examinations, confirmations, birthdays, marriages, sick-beds and
death-beds. At the end I went through the whole sinking of the _Roland_
again. And when you called me, I heard you in spite of my paralysed
condition, but I saw you coming out of an inn on the quay of the little
harbour where Columbus's flag-ship was slowly decaying."

"All right, all right, Friedericus Rex," Peter Schmidt soothed him.
Friedericus Rex had been Frederick's nickname at the university. "Never
mind," Peter continued, in a tone clearly revealing that he took
Frederick's dreams to be a symptom of his over-wrought nerves. "Don't
think of it, don't think of anything, old man. Let your ganglion cells
rest."

Frederick assured Peter that he felt like one newly arisen to a new
world and had rested better than he had for years. While they walked
on together, Peter Schmidt tried to speak only of the mechanical,
physiological causes of the attack. After a while, the friends regained
their old liveliness and began to talk of other things. From now on,
Peter Schmidt was careful never to mention the sinking of the _Roland_
in Frederick's presence.

VII

"We are near Ritter's studio," Schmidt said. "If you like, we might drop
in for a while."

Frederick agreed, again begging his friend not to refer to his nervous
attack.

"It was very astute of me, or of the wire-puller above us, to postpone my
fit until the very moment you were with me," he said.

Several times within the next few hours, Schmidt had occasion to be
struck by Frederick's evident belief in predestination and the
superstition that clung to him from his crossing of the Atlantic.

The street that Bonifacius Ritter's studios were on adjoined Central
Park. In the first room, a man in a round paper cap of his own making
was at work taking a plaster cast of a man. His cap and his smock and
trousers, or as much of his trousers as showed from under his smock
and above his slippers, were covered with hardened daubs of clay.
Death-masks, casts of antique statues, and anatomical studies of the
human body, in whole or part, hung on all the walls. When the workman
left the room to announce the visitors the model, whose u