yourself for every poor dog that strays your way. You ought to
return to a land where, thank the Lord, the aristocracy of the spirit,
the aristocracy of ideas is still a match for that other aristocracy. You
ought to return to a land that would consider itself defunct and buried
were the men of science and art no longer to represent the flower of its
inhabitants. There are enough Germans here without you who are breaking
their necks to forget the language of Goethe, the language their mothers
taught them. Save your wife. Save yourself. Go back to Germany, go to
Switzerland, go to France, go to England, go anywhere you will, but don't
remain in this tremendous industrial corporation, where art, science,
and true culture are, at present at least, wholly out of place."

But Peter Schmidt wavered. He loved America. And if, Indian fashion, he
laid his ear to the ground, he already heard the festive music being
rehearsed below ground that is to be played on the great day of a
universal renaissance.

"All of us," he said, "should first be Americanized and then become
neo-Europeans."

One of Frederick's favourite walks was to the suburb of Meriden where the
Italian wine-growers settled. You could hear the men singing with their
voices warm as the sunlight, the women calling the children with that cry
of theirs pitched in octaves. You saw brown men binding the vines, and on
Sundays you heard them talking and laughing, while the _boccia_ balls
rolled with dull thuds over the well-trodden soil in the open fields
where they played. Those voices and sounds were piercingly sweet and
familiar to Frederick.

"You may kill me for saying so, but I am, and will remain, a European."

His homesickness grew stronger and stronger. He went about singing such
passionate praises of Europe to his friends that he entangled them in the
web of his feelings, and finally melted away even Mrs. Schmidt's rigid
resistance.

A surprising change came over her. She forgot her exhaustion, she moved
briskly, she laughed again, and began to make all sorts of plans for a
future in Europe.

The farmer upon whom Frederick had operated fairly persecuted him with
gratitude. He expatiated upon how he had always relied upon God and how a
man always can rely upon God, and how God on this occasion had sent him
the right man at the right time. Frederick now realised the profound
motive that destiny had had in sending him on his fearful trip.

In a morbid disinc