retty much the chiefs, and although no election had given them their
authority, they exercised so much influence upon what was decided that
in any particular case their fellow-adepts were sure spontaneously to
obey any impulse that they might choose to impart. The meetings of the
Burschen took place upon a little hill crowned by a ruined castle, which
was situated at some distance from Erlangen, and which Sand and Dittmar
had called the Ruttli, in memory of the spot where Walter Furst,
Melchthal, and Stauffacher had made their vow to deliver their country;
there, under the pretence of students' games, while they built up a new
house with the ruined fragments, they passed alternately from symbol to
action and from action to symbol.

Meanwhile the association was making such advances throughout Germany
that not only the princes and kings of the German confederation, but
also the great European powers, began to be uneasy. France sent
agents to bring home reports, Russia paid agents on the spot, and the
persecutions that touched a professor and exasperated a whole university
often arose from a note sent by the Cabinet of the Tuileries or of St.
Petersburg.

It was amid the events that began thus that Sand, after commending
himself to the protection of God, began the year 1817, in the sad mood
in which we have just seen him, and in which he was kept rather by a
disgust for things as they were than by a disgust for life. On the 8th
of May, preyed upon by this melancholy, which he cannot conquer, and
which comes from the disappointment of all his political hopes, he
writes in his diary:

"I shall find it impassible to set seriously to work, and this idle
temper, this humour of hypochondria which casts its black veil over
everything in life,--continues and grows in spite of the moral activity
which I imposed on myself yesterday."

In the holidays, fearing to burden his parents with any additional
expense, he will not go home, and prefers to make a walking tour with
his friends. No doubt this tour, in addition to its recreative side, had
a political aim. Be that as it may, Sand's diary, during the period of
his journey, shows nothing but the names of the towns through which he
passed. That we may have a notion of Sand's dutifulness to his parents,
it should be said that he did not set out until he had obtained his
mother's permission. On their return, Sand, Dittmar, and their friends
the Burschen, found their Ruttli sacked b