Peter Schmidt proposed, since they were both peripatetic philosophers, to take a walk through the streets of New York. Frederick went to consult Ingigerd. He found that for the next few hours she would be completely taken up with dressmakers. All she said was that she hoped to see him again at luncheon. Soon after, the two friends were walking along the asphalt paths of Central Park, swept clean of snow, under the bare, snowy trees between snowy lawns, while the mad city around them filled the air with a hundred-tongued Dionysiac uproar. Though there had been an interruption of eight years in their intercourse, they took up the threads of conversation as if they had parted only half an hour before. Within a short time, each had told the other the most important facts of their lives during those eight years. Frederick for his account of himself had to go back to the date of his marriage, the notice of which he had sent to Peter Schmidt. Without departing from the truth, he related his story with a certain fancifulness, and though stating facts, mingled in psychological effects and spiritual crises. He did not refrain from telling how he had been uprooted and torn this way and that. The first and final achievement of his former life, he said, was that he had acquired the will to resignation, though the tone of his voice, as a result of his morning's experience and his meeting with his best friend, was fresh and vigorous, by no means tinged with the drab of resignation. Peter Schmidt's account of himself, in contrast, was very brief. All he had to report was that his marriage had remained childless and his wife, a physician, overwhelmed with a sort of midwife practice, had to fight against the climate and was sick with longing for her father and mother and her Swiss mountains. Nostalgia, Frederick suggested, was probably the universal ill from which all Germans in America suffered. The Friesian refused to admit it, and Frederick observed in unchanged form that characteristic in his friend which made of him at once the well-informed practical man of affairs and the undismayed ideologist. As ideologist, he hoped for the best for humanity's future in America, for that reason refusing to admit that a large number of the inhabitants of the United States had not yet struck root, spiritually speaking, in the land of liberty. A newsboy with a heavy pack of papers, seeing the Germans laughing and talking and gesticulating in the Park, which at that hour was not much frequented, came toward them, holding out a paper. Peter Schmidt, who had always been a great devourer of newspapers, bought several. "There you are," he said, unfolding one of the immense sheets. "The _Roland_, the _Roland_, and still the _Roland_, columns and pages of the _Roland_." Frederick clutched at his head. "Was I really on the _Roland_?" he exclaimed.