With it passed United States Senator Eugene Harter, of the State of Centralia. Time was when Senator Harter had been a useful figure in the Senate, rather by the possession of a vote than for any other and more forceful reason. But even his vote had been lost of late, for the exigencies of war-complications had terrified him and a nervous and overfed stomach had opportunely collapsed. The Senator fled to the tropics for surcease from troublous national questions and in search of health, and there encountered a mosquito in search of dinner. The mosquito being infected with one of the regional fevers, his victim passed, six weeks later, to that country where politics have been unknown since Lucifer’s insurgents met their historical downfall. Thus was left as heritage to the Senator’s already sufficiently bemuddled State a legacy of further complications, in that his successor must be elected in the early fall. Here was benign Fate moving to meet the welcoming smile of Martin Embree, well ahead of schedule. As soon as official decency permitted, he announced his candidacy for the senatorship. With his German following nothing, he believed, could defeat him. The path of glory extended, broad and unobstructed, before his eager feet to the Capitol at Washington; and thence--who could tell? His campaign prospered from the first. Imagination could picture nothing less like a lion in Martin Embree’s path of progress than the old man who, on a harsh March night of 1917, sat in a scholar’s book-lined study, painfully writing. A bust of Goethe looked benignly down upon him. There were pictures on the walls of Schiller, of Lessing, of Beethoven, of Wagner, and the table was strewn with German publications. By every bond of the old man’s lonely life, he should have been at the Deutscher Club, for good news of the great war had come through private channels, and the _brüdern_ were meeting that evening to celebrate, in good German drink, and hearty German song, and sturdy German sentiment, the promised triumph. Though an American since early boyhood, Professor George Brender had grown old in these associations. He was a lover of sound Rhenish wine and of the noble literature of the mighty German poets, and of that tenderest and loveliest and simplest of all music, the _Lieder_ of the Fatherland, and above all, of the close comradeship of the German-American clan. Tonight he was giving them all up. He had been forced to the sternest decision of his life. Quite simply he wished that he might have died before his seventieth year had set a sword in his hand wherewith he must now sever himself from past loyalties and fellowships. It amounted to that. For, torn to small fragments in his waste-basket, was a letter upon which he had pondered for a week; a letter from another German-American, a man wise and informed and clear of vision and of spirit, and that letter summoned him, in the name of a lifelong friendship, now to declare himself.