discontent and their hopes in
the universities, which, enjoying a kind of constitution of their own,
more easily escaped the investigations made by the spies of the Holy
Alliance; but, repressed as they were, these societies continued
nevertheless to exist, and kept up communications by means of travelling
students, who, bearing verbal messages, traversed Germany under the
pretence of botanising, and, passing from mountain to mountain, sowed
broadcast those luminous and hopeful words of which peoples are always
greedy and kings always fear.

We have seen that Sand, carried away by the general movement, had gone
through the campaign of 1815 as a volunteer, although he was then only
nineteen years old. On his return, he, like others, had found his golden
hopes deceived, and it is from this period that we find his journal
assuming the tone of mysticism and sadness which our readers must have
remarked in it. He soon entered one of these associations, the Teutonia;
and from that moment, regarding the great cause which he had taken up as
a religious one, he attempted to make the conspirators worthy of their
enterprise, and thus arose his attempts to inculcate moral doctrines, in
which he succeeded with some, but failed with the majority. Sand had
succeeded, however, in forming around him a certain circle of Puritans,
composed of about sixty to eighty students, all belonging to the group of
the 'Burschenschaft' which continued its political and religious course
despite all the jeers of the opposing group--the 'Landmannschaft'. One of
his friends called Dittmar and he were pretty 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 con