Then there was another reason which contributed to his unsuspiciousness on this point. Fond as he was of having me with him, and sincerely as he admired my aptness for everything connected with sport, and my remarkable bodily strength, which I liked to display before him, still he scarcely looked upon me as a creature of his own kind. Poor as he was, leading a problematical existence as he had done for many years, he could never forget that he sprang from a most ancient race of nobles, who had once held sway over the island before the princes of Prora-Wiek had been heard of, and when Uselin, my native place, afterwards an important Hanseatic town, was a mere collection of fishers' huts. I am convinced that he, like a dethroned king, had in his heart never renounced his pretensions to the power and wealth which had once been his ancestors'; that he considered that Trantow, Granow, and a score of other titled or untitled gentlemen who held estates in the neighborhood that had once belonged to the Zehrens, had come to their so-called possession of these estates by some absurd whimsy of fortune, but had no genuine title which he recognized, and that wherever he hunted, it was still upon his own ground. This mystical _cultus_ of a long-vanished splendor, of which he still fancied himself the upholder, gave his eye the haughty look, his bearing the dignity, his speech the graciousness, which belong to sovereign princes whose political impotence is so absolute, and whose legitimacy is so unassailable, that they can allow themselves to be perfectly amiable.