returned to the pay and allowances of the peace footing. Hessian soldiers were so well treated that in the last century there was no other army with so few deserters. Why, then, did Seume desert? Why, eight days before the return to Cassel, did he throw away his good name and his pay and his property? Because in a fit of drunkenness he had made himself liable to sharp punishment for his neglect of duty as commissary sergeant, and for fear of the consequences he fled. In ordinary conditions he would never have abandoned the Hessian colors. He makes his fault worse by lying,--pretending that he and others enlisted from Prussian territory were afraid that they would be returned to Prussia and be forced to the hard service in its ranks, and this he says although he knew perfectly well that there was an order published at Bremerlehe which was perfect protection for him and men in exactly his position. Having told one falsehood as to his reason for deserting, he adds another to justify the first, and thus puts himself clearly beyond the pale of credit for any of his statements. He wants to pose as a martyr, and to do so vamps up unfounded charges against the Elector of Hesse. Between 1783 and 1810 Seume thought it more to his credit to try to forget and make others forget that he voluntarily entered the Hessian service, and pretended that he had been forced into it, as a palliation for serving against the Yankees, and boasted of his desertion, as if that, too, was to his credit. He pretends to give the replies he--an utterly unknown, unimportant enlisted man--made to captains, colonels, and generals. Any such answer would soon have brought down the punishment prescribed by the articles of war for insubordination. In later life Seume paid dearly for the sins of his youth,--and he did not atone for them by publishing his own autobiography. He had no reason to find fault with the Hessian service; it was only after he had left it that his real troubles began. It is well known how Prussia for eighty years tyrannized over Northern Germany, weighing heavily on its overburdened people, threatening them until Hanover, Brunswick, Hesse, Saxony, and Poland were all forced to forbid its enlistment of men within their borders. It was during these trying times that Seume was taken by force to Emden, in East Prussia, and there put into a Prussian regiment as a common soldier. Twice he deserted,--once when he was on duty as a sentry,--and he was condemned by court-martial to the awful penalty of running the gauntlet, the whipping by a whole line of soldiers. He escaped, finally, by violating his parole. In his Prussian uniform he paid the penalty for the oath to the Hessian flag which he had broken first. * * * * *