wondered at--the Germans' big supply of red blood?
For the strength of the Teuton's body, Gard observed, was built up,
maintained, in equal measure with his other training. The military
drilling and strenuous gymnastics provided him with straight
shoulders, a full chest, a sound spine, strength of limb--in short,
good, presentable health.

The Bucher fireside had no doctor, no adored specialists, hanging
about. It had been taught to handle simple complaints itself.
Medical and surgical bills did not upset its modest financial
equilibrium. The family were extraordinarily well. Their brawn,
energetically looked after as well as the brain, accounted partly
for their marvelous appetites.

So nothing seemed to Gard to be missed in this potent scheme of
instruction and _Kultur_.

CHAPTER VI

THE HOME

Often when he peeked down from his attic window he spied the shining
bald head of the very elderly Herr Bucher surrounded by the mass of
lively colors of his rose garden. He loved to spend hours there in
the sunshine with his posies, tying up their branches, clipping
choice specimens with which he was fond of decorating the members
of Villa Elsa, its dining table, its living room. Roses, roses,
everywhere.

It was his hobby, this spot of blossoms, and in it his short, bulky
form, so whitened by his Jovian beard meerschaumed by the stains
from his huge, curving German pipe, was often almost lost to view.
He was like some droll gnome waddling about in a flower patch.
Frequently someone had to be sent to find him among all those pets
which he knew so well by their Latin and popular names and by their
characteristics. While he grumbled and so often stormed about in the
house, speaking always in gruff tones of command, he was quite sunny
out there in his plot, although still guttural and dictatorial.

He was a retired professor of phonetics and diction, but now and
then prepared a pupil. This was how he had met his wife a long, long
time before, when she was a young singer. She was twenty years his
junior and had become so completely a housewife that you could
scarcely associate her with any art. She was fat, harsh, homely,
masculine in the way of German women, an occasional long hair
sticking from her face in emulation of a beard.

Devoid of any graces of seduction, putting out her heavy fists in
every direction she exhibited a bearish kindness toward Gard that
seemed calculated at first to frighten him. She was