The poor fellow felt as if his sore heart had been struck with a hammer. His sad yearning for his home was turned to a burning thirst--a consuming desire. He was as homesick as a peasant, nay--as a Slav. Men who live in cities and change their dwelling-place three or four times, never strike root anywhere, and consequently can have no conception of the homesickness that attacks a man who is separated from the soil upon which he and his ancestors for generations have been born and bred. A man thus bred has become acclimated like a plant, to this special air, this special soil, and however long the years of absence, wherever he may have lived meanwhile, he will always yearn for 'home.' Fritz had caught a cold upon leaving Wipling street, at the same time that Siegi had been taken with the illness that ended in his death. Fritz recovered, but his health was shattered, his voice was husky, and h" had feverish nights which in spite of weariness were wakeful. For hours he would pace the wretched room where stood Siegi's empty little bed, which he had not brought himself to have removed, and would conjure up visions of Schneeburg. Sell Schneeburg! In his pain at this fresh blow he forgot for a moment his grief for his child. Memories of 'home' thronged about him with a vividness that savoured of mental hallucination. He saw the morning sun glitter in the dewy moss that lay green on the thatched roofs of the village, he saw the very puddles before the houses wherein the swine wallowed, and a flock of fowls scratching on a muck-heap, and a group of shivering children cowering beneath the cross before the smithy. He saw the pond in the middle of the village; the little dusky waves swelled and rippled beneath the nipping wind of autumn and a single rugged elm cast its long reflection across the broken surface. He saw the soft black soil on the edge of the pond stamped with countless impressions of webbed feet. He saw the geese themselves, hissing and flapping their wings while the sunlight played upon the rough pink surface of their plucked breasts. Thatched roofs, swine, and geese had certainly never interested him much--these detailed impressions had been made upon his mind all unconsciously--they belonged to the whole. He saw long transparent wreaths of mist like ghostly shrouds, floating above the freshly-ploughed fields, and the crows flapping above the brown leafless trees, in gloomy processions, mourners for the dead summer,--a dun-coloured cow was standing between two gnarled apple-trees by the way-side, looking inquisitively out of her dark-blue glazed eyes.