ntly formed
another habit. At least once a week he would drop in at the little house
on Olive Street next to Mr. Brinsmade's big one, which was shut up, and
take tea with Mrs. Brice. Afterward he would sit on the little porch
over the garden in the rear, or on the front steps, and watch the
bob-tailed horse-cars go by. His conversation was chiefly addressed to
the widow. Rarely to Stephen; whose wholesome respect for his employer
had in no wise abated.

Through the stifling heat of these summer days Stephen sat in the outer
office, straining at the law. Had it not been for the fact that Mr.
Whipple went to his mother's house, despair would have seized him long
since. Apparently his goings-out and his comings-in were noted only by
Mr. Richter. Truly the Judge's methods were not Harvard methods. And if
there were pride in the young Bostonian, Mr. Whipple thought he knew the
cure for it.

It was to Richter Stephen owed a debt of gratitude in these days. He
would often take his midday meal in the down-town beer garden with the
quiet German. Then there came a Sunday afternoon (to be marked with a
red letter) when Richter transported him into Germany itself. Stephen's
eyes were opened. Richter took him across the Rhine. The Rhine was
Market Street, and south of that street was a country of which polite
American society took no cognizance.

Here was an epic movement indeed, for South St. Louis was a great sod
uprooted from the Fatherland and set down in all its vigorous crudity in
the warm black mud of the Mississippi Valley. Here lager beer took the
place of Bourbon, and black bread and sausages of hot rolls and fried
chicken. Here were quaint market houses squatting in the middle of wide
streets; Lutheran churches, square and uncompromising, and bulky Turner
Halls, where German children were taught the German tongue. Here, in a
shady grove of mulberry and locust, two hundred families were spread out
at their ease.

For a while Richter sat in silence, puffing at a meerschaum with a huge
brown bowl. A trick of the mind opened for Stephen one of the histories
in his father's library in Beacon Street, across the pages of which had
flitted the ancestors of this blue-eyed and great-chested Saxon. He saw
them in cathedral forests, with the red hair long upon their bodies.
He saw terrifying battles with the Roman Empire surging back and forth
through the low countries. He saw a lad of twenty at the head of rugged
legions clad i