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his lap; but was a gradual strong growth, a slow mutual recognition.

It would be difficult to find a greater contrast than that presented by
Reimers and this Senior-lieutenant Guentz; externally and internally
they differed radically. Reimers was tall and lean, with golden-brown
hair, and a noble, but somewhat melancholy expression; Guentz was small
and very fair, with a tendency to stoutness, and with a red jovial face
like the full moon. The one was romantic and even exuberant, slightly
fantastic in his moods; the other firmly rooted in prosaic fact.

Both were prized as able officers. Reimers was referred to on questions
of military history and science; Guentz was considered an authority on
mathematical technicalities, especially in connection with the
artillery. Thoroughness was a characteristic of each alike; and on the
strength of this, and despite all difference, they were daily attracted
more and more to each other. Guentz, the more expansive nature, soon
opened his whole heart to his friend; though Reimers, partly from a
kind of timidity, still kept his deepest and innermost feelings
somewhat hidden. For Guentz, with his sober sense and terrible logic,
must necessarily, since he could never be otherwise than sincere,
destroy most of the ideals and illusions to which Reimers passionately
clung, and without which he believed he could not live.

Little by little, however, the wall of separation between them gave
way, and their friendship and mutual confidence had become almost
ideal, when Guentz was ordered to serve in the Experimental Department
of the Artillery in Berlin. This was a distinction; but it meant
absence for a year.

Reimers had thus found a friend only to lose him again.

The exchange of letters between the two was not specially brisk. Things
which could be instantly understood in conversation had to be treated
in such detail on paper! They would have had to write each other
scientific treatises, and for that there was no time; Reimers was too
zealous in his garrison duty, and Guentz too much absorbed in the
technical problems on which he was engaged. His loneliness only caused
Reimers to devote himself with the greater zeal to his profession.

Even the irksome duties of the service did not trouble him, and he took
special interest in his recruits, superintending, correcting, and
instructing them. In times of peace this was, indeed, the greatest and
most important work of the young officer,