windup he danced, with great
skill and abandon, a can-can. The ladies tittered and the men
guffawed. After more of the same kind there was enacted a parody on
Shakespeare's "Hamlet." The gentleman responsible for this version had
employed radical means to clear the stage of all the _dramatis
personae_, at the end. Murder, suicide, poison, dagger, lightning even
decimated their ranks, and when the curtain dropped there was not a
soul of them left alive. The crowning effect of this parody was the
appearance of the prompter himself before the footlights. In a few
tear-choked words he informed the audience that after seeing the
actors all die, and nothing but corpses around him, he could and would
not survive, and so he made an end of himself, too, using a rope for
the purpose.

The humor of the whole audience after that grew rapidly boisterous,
and by midnight the tone of this carnival fete given by officers and
their ladies could scarcely be distinguished from that rampant at a
village kermess. If anything, it was a trifle more unconventional.

Lieutenant Kolberg had in the meantime found a cosy arbor into which
to retire with Frau Captain Kahle, and more effectually to exclude
intruders had placed a tall screen before the entrance.

A little "flirtation," more or less serious, was something he could
not do without, and since the garrison with its staid citizens and
their staider wives and daughters did not furnish the material
required for him, he had made up his mind to lay violent siege to the
heart of the lady. He knew that it was a susceptible one, and from
Pommer he had heard, in hours of bibulous intercourse, that siege in
her case meant speedy surrender. He had already progressed with her
beyond mere preliminary skirmishes, and in their conversations with
nobody near they had begun to use the intimate "thou," and to call
each other by their given names.

For his purpose, then, no better time could have been found than this
very festivity, with all the allurements which champagne, music, the
dance, and the hurly-burly of a huge crowd afforded. Shielded against
indiscreet spies by the interlacing vines creeping all over this
arbor, his love-making had proceeded at such a rapid pace that within
an hour the little woman did not thrust her gallant wooer aside when
he dared imprint a kiss on her swelling lips.

In another arbor, more in proximity to the champagne bar, First
Lieutenant Leimann sat in lonely misery