e fat man went out again into the Portchaisengasse
in the direction of the inn, as if he were keeping watch there.

CHAPTER VI. THE SHOEMAKER OF KONIGSBERG.

Chacun ne comprend que ce qu'il trouve en soi.

Nearly two years had passed since the death of Queen Luisa of Prussia.
And she from her grave yet spake to her people--as sixty years later she
was destined to speak to another King of Prussia, who said a prayer by
her tomb before departing on a journey that was to end in Fontainebleau
with an imperial crown and the reckoning for all time of the seven years
of woe that followed Tilsit and killed a queen.

Two years earlier than that, in 1808, while Luisa yet lived, a
few scientists and professors of Konigsberg had formed a sort of
Union--vague enough and visionary--to encourage virtue and discipline
and patriotism. And now, in 1812, four years later, the memory of Luisa
still lingered in those narrow streets that run by the banks of the
Pregel beneath the great castle of Konigsberg, while the Tugendbund,
like a seed that has been crushed beneath an iron heel, had spread its
roots underground.

From Dantzig, the commercial, to Konigsberg, the kingly and the learned,
the tide of war rolled steadily onwards. It is a tide that carries
before it a certain flotsam of quick and active men, keen-eyed,
restless, rising--men who speak with a sharp authority and pay from a
bottomless purse. The arrival of Napoleon in Dantzig swept the first of
the tide on to Konigsberg.

Already every house was full. The high-gabled warehouses on the
riverside could not be used for barracks, for they too had been crammed
from floor to roof with stores and arms. So the soldiers slept where
they could. They bivouacked in the timber-yards by the riverside. The
country-women found the Neuer Markt transformed into a camp when they
brought their baskets in the early morning, but they met with eager
buyers, who haggled laughingly in half a dozen different tongues. There
was no lack of money, however.

Cartloads of it were on the road.

The Neuer Markt in Konigsberg is a square, of which the lower side is a
quay on the Pregel. The river is narrow here. Across it the country is
open. The houses surrounding the quadrangle are all alike--two-storied
buildings with dormer windows in the roof. There are trees in front. In
front of that which is now Number Thirteen, at the right-hand corner,
facing west, sideways to the river, the trees