emphasis on the
fact, that even in our day life is offered as a sacrifice, and that a
pure self-surrender raises to the sublime even the man wearing a
captain's gay uniform of the present day. He wanted to show,
incidentally, that the costume of every age and every condition in life
could be the symbolic expression of the highest greatness; but Roland
did not go along with him, and he had the apparently difficult task of
justifying, or, at least, of explaining the position of Sonnenkamp, who
had incontrovertibly taken the opposite side.

"Yes, yes," exclaimed Roland; "now I remember you said, when we were
with the Russian at Wolfsgarten, 'You could not imagine that a white
boy and a negro boy could be comrades.' Are you, too, a friend of
slavery?"

Eric tried to explain his meaning; and, while striving to reconcile the
difference, he was pleased to notice how open the youth's soul was to
every impression, and how tenaciously it clung to things spoken of only
in a cursory and incidental way.

Eric sat with Roland until it was very late; he was obliged to satisfy
his ingenuous mind, and this was almost the hardest task that had ever
been laid upon him. The youth was to be made to perceive that there was
another way of considering the question, one that regarded slavery as
justifiable and a righteous necessity; he was never to let his father
know that he considered him in the wrong, and that he had happened to
become acquainted, through the Professorin, with a spirit that ought
not to have been conjured up in this house. Eric called to mind his
mother, who had admonished him, with reason, that he was to adopt that
course of instruction for Roland which was necessary, and not that
which the youth himself preferred. Circumstances now rendered it
necessary to follow only that track which the youth had entered upon
for himself. It was a matter of rejoicing that he had of himself struck
out the path; it was just what all education proposed: and now was he
to turn aside from this track, and to shatter in pieces the abiding
fundamental principle. Thou shalt, and thou shalt not?

"It seems to me like a dream," Roland went on to say; "a great negro
once held me in his arms; I remember distinctly all about him; I
remember his woolly hair, and how I pulled him by it; his face was
smooth, without any beard at all."

"The negroes have no growth of beard," added Eric, and the youth
continued, dreamily:--

"I have been carried b