lue apron, a stone-cutter's
helper, who might equally well have been a wine-cellar keeper, brought in
a bottle of old Rhine wine and several coloured hock glasses.

The wonderful poetry of their student days long past descended upon the
friends. Frederick was still in a state of excitement and irrational
recklessness. He pinned his faith to the moment, ready to stake his
yesterday and his morrow upon it. The twilight of the room brought back
memories of youthfully blissful times. He had found his old friend again
and a new friend of the same warmth of temperament and of the same German
ways, far from the old home. Settling himself snugly in the corner by the
window, like a man intending to take his ease in a restaurant, he touched
glasses with the others and uttered an exclamation of rapture.

"You'll never get me to budge from this corner, Mr. Ritter--though," he
added, "I should first like to see your works."

"No hurry about that," said Ritter gaily, at the same time bringing an
album bound in pigskin, in which he asked Frederick and Schmidt to write
their names. Then he opened a very practical closet reaching to the
floor, one of Willy's contrivances, and took out a carved wooden figure,
a German Madonna by Till Riemenschneider. The sweet oval of her lovely
face was not so much that of a Madonna as of a real German Gretchen.

"Willy Snyders told me," Ritter explained, "that he bought it from a
rascal of a New York customs official, a man of German extraction, whose
father had been a cabinet-maker in Ochsenfurt. The figure comes from the
town-hall there and had been taken to the cabinet-maker for repair. He
substituted another freshly painted figure, which the good folk of
Ochsenfurt greeted with joy as the original greatly beautified and
rejuvenated. Thus, Willy Snyders. I am not responsible for the version,"
he concluded laughing. "But one thing is certain, it's a genuine
Riemenschneider."

The lovely statue by the Wuerzburg master radiated a vivid charm, which
with the spell of the small room, decorated with such tender affection
for old memories, and the greenish-golden sparkle of the Rhine wine in
the hock glasses, brought back the German home in all its deep-seated
force and beauty--a beauty, it is true, unintelligible, and therefore
non-existent, to the average German of to-day.

"Once I followed up Tillman Riemenschneider's works," said Ritter. "I
started at Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and went down the va