I strode up and down my cell. For the first time since my sickness I felt something of my former strength; it was but a remnant, but enough to bring back a part of my old roving humor, of my old restlessness. How would it be then when I felt myself all that I had ever been? Would it not, combined with the knowledge that nothing held me but my own will, drive me to frenzy? Would it not have been better if they had left me in my old slavery, with the dream that some day I should be able to break their bonds, even if this dream was never verified? "Here is a young man who wants to speak with us," announced the sergeant. Since my sickness when "we" had come through so much together, he frequently used in speaking to me the same plural which he employed with all who, in his opinion, had acquired an entire claim on his honest heart; for example, the superintendent and all his family, including the doctor, and now myself. "What sort of a man!" I asked, while a joyous shiver ran through me. As long as I had been in confinement this was the first time that any one had come to see me; and somehow I connected the extraordinary event of a visitor with the thoughts that had been passing through my mind. "Looks like a sailor," answered the sergeant. "Says he has news of our dead brother." This sounded extremely improbable. My brother Fritz had been dead for five years; he had fallen from the foreyard overboard one stormy night, and was drowned. The ship had returned in safety; there was no mystery of any sort connected with his death; and if any one now brought me intelligence of his end, there must be some other purpose involved with it. "Can I speak with him, Süssmilch?" I asked, in the most indifferent tone I could assume, while my heart seemed to rise in my throat. "We can speak to whom we like." "Then let him in; and, Süssmilch, if he is a sailor he would like a glass of something; perhaps you could get me something of the kind?" What superfluous trouble a man with an evil conscience gives himself and others! I must needs lie, always a trial to me, to get the old man out of the way; and the honest Süssmilch, who had not a thought of being present at my interview with the stranger, had to go down two flights of stairs into the cellar. "But we mustn't touch a drop ourselves," said the old man, warningly. "Have no fear." He went, after first introducing the visitor--a broad-shouldered deeply-bronzed man in sailor dress who was an entire stranger to me. CHAPTER VII.