certain there were none in the Quaker's little hermitage on the
hill, where he lived on herbs, with two old rustic servants, and with
no other voice of man for year after year. Prince Otto looked down
with something of a grim smile at the bright, square labyrinths of the
lamp-lit city below him. For as far as the eye could see there ran the
rifles of his friends, and not one pinch of powder for his enemies.
Rifles ranked so close even to that mountain path that a cry from him
would bring the soldiers rushing up the hill, to say nothing of the fact
that the wood and ridge were patrolled at regular intervals; rifles so
far away, in the dim woods, dwarfed by distance, beyond the river, that
an enemy could not slink into the town by any detour. And round the
palace rifles at the west door and the east door, at the north door and
the south, and all along the four facades linking them. He was safe.

"It was all the more clear when he had crested the ridge and found
how naked was the nest of his old enemy. He found himself on a small
platform of rock, broken abruptly by the three corners of precipice.
Behind was the black cave, masked with green thorn, so low that it was
hard to believe that a man could enter it. In front was the fall of the
cliffs and the vast but cloudy vision of the valley. On the small rock
platform stood an old bronze lectern or reading-stand, groaning under a
great German Bible. The bronze or copper of it had grown green with the
eating airs of that exalted place, and Otto had instantly the thought,
'Even if they had arms, they must be rusted by now.' Moonrise had
already made a deathly dawn behind the crests and crags, and the rain
had ceased.

"Behind the lectern, and looking across the valley, stood a very old
man in a black robe that fell as straight as the cliffs around him, but
whose white hair and weak voice seemed alike to waver in the wind.
He was evidently reading some daily lesson as part of his religious
exercises. 'They trust in their horses...'

"'Sir,' said the Prince of Heiligwaldenstein, with quite unusual
courtesy, 'I should like only one word with you.'

"'...and in their chariots,' went on the old man weakly, 'but we
will trust in the name of the Lord of Hosts....' His last words were
inaudible, but he closed the book reverently and, being nearly blind,
made a groping movement and gripped the reading-stand. Instantly his two
servants slipped out of the low-browed cavern and support