must have spoken them aloud. Yet he
was conscious that he had not, and that when the time came for him to
face this throng he would never go beyond the first three words, "I am
guilty."

He found himself speaking quietly to Mr. Weaver, and looked on at the
conversation as if he were a thing apart from himself.

"The next case but one after this will begin the moonshine cases, and
you-all surely won't come on until to-morrow morning. You might as well
go now."

"I thank you," said Friedrich, and stumbled from the room.

In the corridor he leaned for a moment against the wall, that he might
be sure to keep his balance as he went down the steep stairs dizzying
before him.

How he reached the court on the next day he never could remember. He
was conscious of feeling very ill, worse than ever he had felt in his
life. His spine pulsed painfully up into his brain; his eyes burned
back in their sockets until the two shafts of anguish met in one
well-nigh unbearable torture. The cloud-mist wrapped about him and
hindered him, and yielded only to blind him more. The same evil smells
reeked around him, and a wave of nausea surged within him.

He heard his name called, and some one guided him to that part of the
Judge's platform that served as a dock. He raised his hand, and heard
afar off some words about the truth and God. He was bidden to kiss the
filthy cover of a book. Dimly he heard a question and answered it.

"I am guilty."

A chair was pushed towards him and he sat down, conscious of a strange
silence in the usually noisy room.

He heard Wilder telling his story of his purchase of a quart of whisky,
"an' he owned it was blockade," and a long and detailed account of "the
Dutchy's" resistance to arrest, in which the ferocity of his behavior
would have been creditable to a bloodthirsty villain driven to
desperate straits.

A voice asked him if he had anything to say, and he heard himself
repeating once again, "I am guilty."

Then the voice of the laureate of the eagle's nest soared, and fell to
a whisper, and swelled again, and Friedrich wondered if "example" would
be "_Muster_" or "_Beispiel_." And "different class,"--what did that
mean? How stupid he was about English!

By-and-by there was silence, and the Judge's voice said,--

"Three months or a hundred dollars."

And then there was a long, long silence.

XI

In the Corn

Summer had come.

The soft days of spring had gone by, the days when