ld goods. A dead horse catches on to the punt; a
musty odour of damp decay hovers about. At an over-turned house, men in
a punt are busied fishing up a corpse; it hangs on their boat-hooks with
slack arms and long, wet hair, the pallid, dead head drooping backwards;
it is a woman. Herman sees Othomar's lips quiver.

Now they float through a street of tall, deserted houses in a poor
suburb. This part has been flooded for days. They alight in a square;
the people are there; they cheer. Louder and louder they cheer, moved by
the sight of their prince, who has come across the water to save them. A
group of students shout, call out his name and cheer and wave their
coloured caps.

Othomar shakes hands with the mayor, the minister for waterways, the
governor of Altara and other dignitaries. His heart is full; he feels a
sob welling up from his breast.

From among the group of students one steps forward, a big, tall lad:

"Highness!" he cries. "May we be your guard-of-honour?"

Etiquette hardly exists here, though the dignitaries look angry.
Othomar, remembering his own student days, not yet so long ago, presses
the student's hand; Prince Herman does the same; and the students grow
excited and once more shout and clamour:

"Hurrah! Hurrah! Othomar for ever! Gothland for ever!"

Behind this square the city is perceived to be in distress, a silent
distress from yet greater danger threatening: the old coronation-city,
the city of learning and tradition, the sombre monument of the middle
ages; she looks grey compared with white Lipara, which lies laughing
yonder and is beautiful with new marble on her blue sea, but which does
not love her sovereigns so well as she does, the dethroned capital, with
her gigantic Romanesque cathedral, where the sacred imperial crown with
the cross of St. Ladislas is pressed on the temples of every emperor of
Liparia. Though her masters are faithless to her and have for centuries
lived in their white Imperial over yonder and no longer in the old
castellated fortress of the country's patron saint, she, the old city,
the mother of the country, remains faithful to them with her maternal
love and not because of her oath, but because of her blood, of her
heart, of all her life, which is her old tradition....

* * * * *

But, like his father, Othomar was not this time to go to the Castle of
St. Ladislas: the fortress lay too high and too far from the town, too
far fr