nts of the United States had not yet struck
root, spiritually speaking, in the land of liberty.

A newsboy with a heavy pack of papers, seeing the Germans laughing and
talking and gesticulating in the Park, which at that hour was not much
frequented, came toward them, holding out a paper. Peter Schmidt, who
had always been a great devourer of newspapers, bought several.

"There you are," he said, unfolding one of the immense sheets. "The
_Roland_, the _Roland_, and still the _Roland_, columns and pages of the
_Roland_."

Frederick clutched at his head.

"Was I really on the _Roland_?" he exclaimed.

"Very much so, it seems," said Schmidt. "Here you are in black type.
'Doctor Frederick von Kammacher performs miracles of bravery.' And here
they have a picture of you."

The artist of _The World_ had with a few strokes dashed off a young man,
the replica of a million others of his kind, descending into a life-boat
on a rope ladder from the top deck of a half-submerged steamer and
carrying on his back a young lady wearing nothing but a shift.

"Did you really do it?" asked Peter Schmidt.

"I don't think so," said Frederick. "I must admit the details of the
accident are not very clear in my mind any more." Frederick stood still,
turned pale, and tried to recollect. "I don't know," he said, "what is
most fearful about such an event, the things that really occurred, or the
fact that one gradually digests it and forgets it." Still standing in the
middle of the path, he continued: "What strikes a man hardest is the
absurdity of it, the stupid senselessness of it, the superlative
brutality. We know nature's brutality in theory; but to be able to live,
we must forget it in its real extent, in its gruesome actuality. The most
enlightened modern man somehow and somewhere in his soul still believes
in something like an all-beneficent God. But such an experience gives
that 'somehow' and 'somewhere' an unmerciful drubbing with iron fists.
And I have come from the sinking of the _Roland_ with a spot in my
soul deaf and dumb and numb. It has not awakened to life yet. The
brutalisation is so extreme that while it is still fresh in one's mind,
one would as soon express belief in God or man or the future of humanity
or in a Utopia, or anything else of the sort, as give utterance to
something that one knows to be a vile deception. What is the sense of
our sentimentalising over man's dignity, his divine destiny, when such
fearful, ina