"Will it never end, this battle of Jew and Greek?" he said, half to himself, so that she did not know whether he meant it personally or generally. Then, as she tore herself away, "I fear I have shocked you," he said tenderly. "But one thing I have never blasphemed--Life. Is not enjoyment an implicit prayer, a latent grace? After all, God is our Father, not our drill-master. He is not so dull and solemn as the parsons make out. He made the kitten to chase its tail and my Nonotte to laugh and dance. Come again, dear child, for my friends have grown used to my dying, and expect me to die for ever--an inverted immortality. But one day they will find the puppet-show shut up and the jester packed in his box. Good-bye. God bless you, little Lucy, God bless you." The puppet-show was shut up sooner than he expected; but the jester had kept his most wonderful _mot_ for the last. "_Dieu me pardonnera_," he said. "_C'est son métier._" THE PEOPLE'S SAVIOUR I "Der Bahn, der kühnen, folgen wir, Die uns geführt Lassalle." Such is the Marseillaise the Social Democrats of Germany sing, as they troop out when the police break up their meetings. This Lassalle, whose bold lead they profess to follow, lies at rest in the Jewish cemetery of his native Breslau under the simple epitaph "Thinker and Fighter," and at his death the extraordinary popular manifestations seemed to inaugurate the cult of a modern Messiah--the Saviour of the People. II But no man is a hero to his valet or his relatives, and on the spring morning when Lassalle stood at the parting of the ways--where the Thinker's path debouched on the Fighter's--his brother-in-law from Prague, being in Berlin on business, took the opportunity of remonstrating. "I can't understand what you mean by such productions," he cried, excitedly waving a couple of pamphlets. "That is not my fault, my dear Friedland," said Lassalle suavely. "It takes _some_ brain to follow even what I have put so clearly. What have you there?" "The lecture to the artisans, for which you have to go to gaol for four months," said the outraged ornament of Prague society, which he illumined as well as adorned, having, in fact, the town's gas-contract.