ehemently: "I now
understand the legend of Medusa. The uneducated class is such a head.
If a man should look into its face, he would turn into stone before its
horrid visage, so wild, so malevolent, so false, so furious. Our much
vaunted German nation is not yet ripe, either for universal suffrage,
or for the right of sitting on a jury. Indeed, since we have obtained
what we have so long and ardently desired, the German wave in the tide
of morality is sinking away. Our German people are not so great as we
believed and hoped."

The judge earnestly protested against this assertion, and insisted that
although there were undoubtedly deplorable indications, still the wave
was beginning to rise again.

The physician, who still clung to the old ideal of his student days--an
ideal always mingled with a profound hatred of Metternich--came bravely
to the judge's assistance, by declaring that the influence of the
profligate times of Metternich is still felt; for our people persist in
the belief that everything that our rulers propose to do is wrong and
tyrannical; and applaud when the law is evaded, or a criminal slips
through without punishment.

In conclusion the physician could not refrain from giving the lawyer,
who, while he really had a contempt for the people, belonged to the
so-called radical wing of the liberty party, to understand that his
party was greatly to blame for the disorganization of the popular mind,
by its carping depreciation of the great and good things which had
actually been accomplished.

The clergyman agreed that the foundation of all the mischief lay in the
weakening of religious belief; but the schoolmaster was bold enough to
assert that in the boasted days of unshaken faith there was much more
wickedness in the world than now.

The discussion was apparently about to be taken up with the subject of
religion, which was strictly forbidden in the Casino. But the
Protestant minister's timid, quiet wife, happily turned the
conversation, by asking, during a slight pause:

"Are there not more offenders who are undetected than are ever brought
to justice?"

No one seemed to care to answer this question, and the young lady
blushed deeply at the silence that followed her words, but at length
the schoolteacher took pity on her, and said, with a smile:

"It is quite impossible to give an exact answer to your question; but
it is probably much as it is with the aerolites. Two-thirds of our
planet is cover