worth while to
publish as widely as possible the fact that he, the man without arms,
actually possessed a wife.

"I have met with the most tremendous success this time," he said. "Last
night the audience stormed the stage and lifted me on their shoulders to
the tune of '1492,' the song they sing every evening in the Metropolitan
Theatre."

"1492"--wherever he turned his eyes, on the streets and open squares,
Frederick read advertisements of the ballad, a product of the vaudeville
stage, in which the discovery of America, four hundred years after the
landing of Columbus, was interpreted in the patriotic sense of the new
nation that had since arisen.

"Well, Doctor von Kammacher, how are you?" asked Doctor Wilhelm. "How
have you spent your time?"

"Oh, so, so," Frederick replied, shrugging his shoulders. He did not know
how he came to frame this summary dismissal of a time so rich in content.
Strange to say, here on land, in the Hoffman bar, little or none of his
former impulse remained to entrust confidences to his fellow-physician.

"How's our little girl?" Doctor Wilhelm inquired, smiling significantly.

"I do not know," Frederick returned with an expression of cool
astonishment, and added: "Whom do you mean?"

As his answers to all their inquiries were equally curt and stiff, it was
impossible to start a conversation. He himself in the first few minutes
did not understand why he had come. It was extremely disturbing to him
that the other men in the bar-room recognised the group as the survivors
of the _Roland_. Stoss by himself, the man without arms, the well-known
marksman, would have been conspicuous.

Stoss could drink holding a glass between his teeth; but he was not
touching liquor to-day. Nevertheless, he was in a treating mood, a
circumstance by which Captain Butor, Wendler, Fleischmann and the sailors
profited to toast one another freely. Nor did Doctor Wilhelm require much
urging.

In an undertone he informed Frederick that _The Staats-Zeitung_ in its
issue of the morning before had opened a collection for Fleischmann, and
a sum had already come in such as the poor fellow in his whole life had
probably never before seen. At last Frederick laughed, and heartily. He
understood why Fleischmann was drinking heavily, with so determined a
manner, and why he was puffing himself like a turkey.

"What do you think of that stuff, Doctor von Kammacher?" he asked,
pointing to the paintings and snorting disda