rvice.

"I feel," he declared, "as if this house had been waiting for me, and I
for the house."

XXV

The very next day he took up his abode in his lonely refuge on Lake
Hanover, which he alternately dubbed his Diogenes tub, his Uncle Tom's
Cabin, and his retort. It was no Diogenes tub, because the two friends
brought wood and anthracite coal for a little American stove in the
bedroom, which gave quite a good deal of heat and made a cosey appearance
with the glow of the burning coal visible; and because the kitchen and
pantry contained everything that is necessary for life, and a little
more. Frederick refused to have anybody share his quarters with him or
help with the housework. As he said, he wanted to settle his accounts and
take his trial balance, and the presence of another person might be
disturbing to that process.

After Peter Schmidt disappeared in the distance and the sound of the
sleigh-bells had died away and Frederick felt he was quite alone in that
wide American landscape wrapped in the night's darkness, it was a supreme
moment for him. He returned into the house, closed the door and listened.
He heard the crackling of the wood in the small kitchen stove. Taking the
candle that had been left standing on one of the lower steps in the hall,
he went up-stairs, where the warmth and the dusky glow of his little
American stove rejoiced him. He lit a lamp, and after arranging his
toilet articles on an unusually long, bare dresser, he settled himself
beside the lamp in a comfortable bamboo chair. He was filled with a
mysterious sense of rich, deep delight.

He was alone. Outside, lay the clear, silent winter's night, the same
that he had known in the home of his childhood. The things he had
hitherto experienced were no more, or as if they never had been. His
home, his parents, his wife, his children, the girl that had drawn him
across the ocean, everything that had happened to him on his trip were
nothing more in his soul than magic lantern pictures.

"Is life," Frederick asked himself, "meant to be nothing more than
material for dreams? So much is certain, my present condition is the sort
that leaves an everlasting effect. We should not be unsociable, but we
have still less right to leave this state uncultivated, which is the
basic state of man's personality, in which he is most natural and
undisturbed and stands face to face with the mystery of life as though it
were a dream."

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