ts and incidents that he had not thought of for ten years
or more occurred to him. How his father's accounts of hunting expeditions
and sleighing mishaps had set them all laughing when the family was
cosily gathered together in one room on a winter evening.

During that brisk, refreshing drive Frederick's heart was
rejuvenated. The happiest years of his boyhood were as vivid to him as
yesterday--thrilling, romantic rides by night, when the same sound of
sleigh-bells scared the silence of sleeping forests and filled the boy's
soul with pictures of midnight attacks, romantic murders, and strange
devilish phantoms. In the dazzling brilliance of the snowy fields,
breathing in the pure, bracing air, mere existence became unspeakable
bliss. Sitting there in that dainty sleigh Frederick was inclined to look
on life as a pleasure drive.

Suddenly he turned pale and had to hand the reins over to Peter Schmidt.
In the jingling of the sleigh-bells his ear caught something like the
insistent hammering ring of electric bells. It was an illusion of his
hearing, but it filled him with rising horror, and a shiver went through
his whole body. By the time Peter Schmidt, who instantly observed the
change in his friend, had brought the horse to a stop, Frederick had
already mastered his nervous attack. He did not admit it was the sinking
of the _Roland_ that had unexpectedly announced its presence again. He
merely said that the noise of the bells had irritated his nerves beyond
endurance. Fortunately, the spotless expanse of Lake Hanover was already
close by and the little house on the other shore already visible. So the
two men descended from the sleigh. Peter Schmidt, in silence, removed the
bells from the harness and hitched the horse to the branch of a bare
tree. They crossed the frozen lake on foot, making for the solitary house
under its heavy covering of snow.

Peter ascended the front door steps, which resembled great bolsters of
snow, and opened the door.

"To judge by the way it looks now, the house is scarcely habitable in
winter."

"Oh, yes it is," Frederick declared.

Having been built for summer use only, it had no cellar. On the ground
floor there was a little kitchen and two other rooms; in the attic a
bedroom as large as the two down-stairs rooms together. In the attic room
Frederick immediately decided to build his nest for an indeterminate
length of time. He scouted Peter's considerations in regard to household
se