"When you arrive in Germany, my daughter, greet the old home and the old home-river for me! Do you hear, Jane? Salute Germany for me! Salute our Rhine!" The words came painfully subdued, almost inaudible from his lips. Jane gazed at him in mingled surprise and terror. "Have you then loved Germany so much, father? You have almost taught me to hate it." Forest was silent for a brief space; his lips quivered, and tears, seemingly wrung from a terrible inward conflict, rolled down his cheeks. "The home-land had only misery for me," he said in a voice trembling with emotion. "It persecuted, degraded me, cast me out; it denied even bread to me and mine. America gave me freedom, gave me riches and honor; and now, Jane, I would renounce them all--all, could I only die upon the Rhine!" There lay such harrowing anguish in this final utterance of a long repressed sorrow, that Jane recoiled in terror before it. This fatal homesickness! Her mother, the sensitive, delicate woman, after long years of suffering, had died of it at last; and her father, that proud, energetic man who had so entirely broken away from home and its remembrances, who had united heart and soul with the land of his adoption, and had seemed petrified into hatred against his fatherland, he too had buried this agonized longing deep in his heart, only to acknowledge it in his dying hour! Jane stood dumb and bewildered before this discovery, but she felt that here, just here, that strange something lay, which, despite all misunderstanding, had yet made her father and mother one; which must keep her eternally remote from both. She gazed intently at her father, he now lay quiet, with closed eyes and compressed lips. She knew that in such moments as this she must not disturb him. Softly gliding to the window, she let down the curtain, and the usual subdued twilight again ruled in the sick chamber. CHAPTER II. A Strange Cavalier. "Well, Miss Jane, a most promising introduction this much bepraised Rhine gives us, to that fatherland of yours! In six-and-thirty hours, I have become mortally weary of the whole country. We landed in such a fog that we couldn't see the shore until we set foot on it; that day we passed in Hamburg there was such a rain that I really thought a second deluge had broken out, and here upon the Rhine, we find a pretty state of things, don't we? I cannot understand how you remain so calm through it all!"