d caressed his fair curls. Then he
invited him gaily to sit right close to him on the footstool, and bade
the other children to sit down, too, and told Karl and Kurt to keep their
ears wide open.

My wife and I entered at this moment--we heard later of what had
happened--and begged the colonel to allow us to listen also. The
permission was willingly granted; after the lamp was brought, for it was
later than usual, and we had settled ourselves on the sofa, the colonel
stroked his moustache for some time, and began, after he had gazed
quietly before him for a moment: "To-day my story shall be called, 'The
Nuts.' Does that please you, Hermy?"

The little one smiled at him expectantly and nodded his head. The colonel
continued:

"You believe, no doubt, children, that no one ever came back from the
dead, and that therefore no mortal knows what Heaven looks like, nor
Hell. But I--look at me well--I can tell you something about it."

Here he made a short pause while my wife handed him his pipe and a match.
The children looked at one another in doubt and suspicion, for this was
the first story of the colonel which had not begun with, "Here I am," or,
"Once upon a time," and they were consequently uncertain whether it was a
true story or one that he had made up. Wolfgang, who is thirteen and my
oldest boy, and who already calls his younger brothers, "the young
ones,"--and promises to be a true child of the times, inclined to believe
it the latter, but even he sat up straighter and looked puzzled as the
colonel continued:

"The two balls that I have in here, and the sabre cut on my
shoulder,--but you know how and where I received them--to be brief, I
sank from my horse onto the grass in the afternoon, and not until the
following morning was I found by the ambulance corps and carried to the
hospital. There they brought me to life again. In the interim--which
lasted for the half of a day and one whole night--I was certainly not
alive like one of you, or any other two-legged creature endowed with five
senses."

With these words his penetrating eyes glanced from Karl to Kurt; the
girls caught hold of one another's hands and one could plainly read in
their expressions that they considered it rash to be in such close
proximity to a person who had erstwhile been dead. It was fortunate for
them that the resuscitated colonel was so good, and that there was no
doubt about his actual existence, which was proved by his voice and the