man, and there is no article of the code that
entitles you to send me there." Yet six months' imprisonment was
adjudged him, and the most he could obtain by his ingeniously
inexhaustible technical pleas was deferment of his punishment.

But there was consolation in the memories of his triumphal tour
through the Rhenish provinces, where the Union had struck widest root.
Town after town sent its whole population to greet him. Roaring
thousands met him at the railway stations, and he passed under
triumphal arches and through streets a-flutter with flags, where
working-girls welcomed him with showers of roses. "Such scenes as
these," he wrote to the Countess, "must have attended the foundation
of new religions." And, indeed, as weeping working-men fought to draw
his carriage, and as he looked upon the vast multitudes surging around
him, he could not but remember Heine's prophecy: "You will be the
Messiah of the nineteenth century."

"I have not grasped this banner," he cried at Ronsdorf, "without
knowing quite clearly that I myself may fall. But in the words of the
Roman poet:

"'Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.'

May some avenger and successor arise out of my bones! May this great
and national movement of civilization not fall with my person. But may
the conflagration which I have kindled spread farther and farther as
long as one of you still breathes!"

Those were his last words to the working-men of Germany.

For beneath all the flowers and the huzzahing what a tragedy of broken
health and broken hopes! Each glowing speech represented a victory
over throat-disease and over his own fits of scepticism. His nerves,
shattered by the tremendous strain of the year, the fevers, the
disillusions, the unprofitable shiftings of standpoint, painted the
prospect as black as they had formerly ensanguined it. And the six
months' imprisonment hanging over him gained added terrors from his
physical breakdown. Even on his eider-down bed he could not woo
sleep--how then on a prison pallet?

When he started the Union he had imagined he could bring the
Socialistic movement to a head in a year. When, after a year as
crammed as many a lifetime, he went down at the Countess's persuasion
to take the milk-cure at Kaltbad on the Righi, he confessed to his
friend Becker that he saw no near hope save from a European war.

IX

One stormy day at the end of July, a bovine-eyed Swiss boy, dripping
with rain, appeared at the