l-bred guests
cheered the old fellow, but the host was ghastly with confusion, and
never forgave him.

III

But Lassalle's laughter soon ceased. Another recollection stabbed him
to silence. The old man was dead--that beautiful, cheerful old man.
Never more would his blue eyes gaze in proud tenderness on his darling
brilliant boy. But a few months ago and he had seemed the very type of
ruddy old age. How tenderly he had watched over his poor broken-down
old wife, supporting her as she walked, cutting up her food as she
ate, and filling her eyes with the love-light, despite all her pain
and weakness. And now this poor, deaf, shrivelled little mother, had
to totter on alone. "Father, what have you to do to-day?" he
remembered asking him once. "Only to love you, my child," the old man
had answered cheerily, laying his hand on his son's shoulder.

Yes, he had indeed loved him. What long patience from his childhood
upwards; patience with the froward arrogant boy, a law to himself even
in forging his parents' names to his school-notes, and meditating
suicide because his father had beaten him for demanding more elegant
clothes; patience with the emotional volcanic youth to whose grandiose
soul a synod of professors reprimanding him seemed unclean crows and
ravens pecking at a fallen eagle that had only to raise quivering
wings to fly towards the sun; patience with his refusal to enter a
commercial career, and carry on the prosperous silk business; patience
even with his refusal to study law and medicine. "But what then do you
wish to study, my boy? At sixteen one must choose decisively."

"The vastest study in the world, that which is most closely bound up
with the most sacred interests of humanity--History."

"But what will you live on, since, as a Jew, you can't get any post or
professorship in Prussia?"

"Oh, I shall live somehow."

"But why won't you study medicine or law?"

"Doctors, lawyers, and even savants, make a merchandise of their
knowledge. I will have nothing of the Jew. I will study for the sake
of knowledge and action."

"Do you think you are a poet?"

"No, I wish to devote myself to public affairs. The time approaches
when the most sacred ends of humanity must be fought for. Till the end
of the last century the world was held in the bondage of the stupidest
superstition. Then rose, at the mighty appeal of intellect, a material
force which blew the old order into bloody fragments. Intellectually