Fritz now related with immense importance all that had taken place yesterday, how Droz had slept in Mamsell Westphalen's room and turned everything, upside down; and how he himself had smashed the Herr Amtshauptmann's pipes--he couldn't help it, though--it was Hanchen's fault;--and how the Colonel had been going to run the Herr Amtshauptmann through the body with his sword; and how Mamsell Westphalen was sitting in the kitchen, like a picture of woe. But he said nothing about the lump of ice. Now, my uncle, the Rathsherr Herse, was an ardent patriot, but he kept it a profound secret. And he had his reasons. For, as he whispered to me many years afterwards when Buonaparte had long been dead, he belonged at this time to the secret society of the "Tugendbund." And I can believe it, for when he was in company he was always playing with a long watch-chain made of light-coloured hair--and Aunt Herse's was black--and he wore a large dangerous-looking iron ring on his finger, with which he once struck Höpner the locksmith's apprentice nearly dead, when he was behaving rudely in court. "Fritz," he said to me later on, "this light hair is that of an heroic virgin who had her head shaven for the Fatherland in the year thirteen, and the iron ring cost me my gold one. But don't talk of it; I don't like it spoken about." He was rightly therefore much given to secrets about the time of this story. And it is possible, too, that his habit of looking at life from a commanding point of view and seizing everything as a whole without regard to details had something to do with his secret brotherhood, for while my Father had to plague himself day and night with the smallest squabbles and quarrels, in order that the government of the little town might not lose what small amount of life it had, Rathsherr Herse commanded Kutusoff to march to the right and Czeruitcheff to the left, and praised York, and blamed Bülow because he didn't understand his business; for he ought not to have gone to Berlin, he ought to have marched to the right of Stemhagen and fallen on Buonaparte's flank.--In short Uncle Herse was just the man to make a thunderstorm out of a sunshower. In every innocent French corporal he saw the Corsican monster, and if Luth, the Town Messenger, happened to get a blow in a peasants' row on Blue Monday, he made as much fuss as if the Duke of Mecklenburg himself had been struck. "Hold your tongue, boy," he whispered impressively. "Do you want to scream out your sentence of death in the public market-place! I wouldn't give a groschen for the watchmaker's chance of life, for it is certain that the Miller and his Friedrich have murdered the French Chasseur." "Not the Miller," interrupted Fritz, "the Miller was made up of brandy and good-nature yesterday."