"I go to France, but yet every night at the same hour freezes my blood and I hear the death volley. "I come to America, which I have hated, yet never a night is missed. It is at the same hour. What I hate comes to me. Whatever I fear is mine. To run away from something is for me to meet it. My estate is gone; money I have not. I sink like a man in a quicksand, down, down, down. I come here. Lower I cannot." "One day in the Bend, where das Gesindel live, I see the little girl--she of the golden hair, who wiped my stain away. "But she is dead. I know for sure the face. What it means I know not. Again I fall as dead. "I have one thing in the world left--only one; it is my scissors-grinder. I sell it and give all the money to bury her. It is the first--it is the only good I ever did. Then, an outcast, I go out into the world where no pity is. I sit me down in a dark alley; strange is my heart, and new. "It is time for the guns--yet is my blood warm! I wait. The volley comes not! "The hour is past! "'My Gott! My Gott!' I say. 'Can this be true?' I wait one, two, three minutes; it comes not. I scream for joy--I scream loud! I feel an iron hand on me. I am put in prison. Yet is the prison filled with light--yet am I in heaven. The guns are silent." One day a big letter with several patches of red sealing-wax and an aristocratic monogram arrived at the bunk-house. Nearly two hundred men handled it and stood around until the Graf arrived. Every one felt a personal interest in the contents. It was "One-eyed Dutchy" who handed it to the owner, and stood there watching out of his single eye the face of his former master. The old man smiled as he folded the letter and put it into his pocket, saying as he did so: "By next ship I leave for Hamburg to take life up where I laid it down." _A Statesman Under a Cloud_ I was sitting on the bench near the door in the bunk-house one day at twilight, when I noticed a profile silhouetted against the window. I had seen only one profile like that in my life, and that was when I was a boy. I moved closer. The man sat like a statue. His face was very pale, and he was gazing vacantly at the walls in the rear of the building. Finally I went over and sat down beside him. "Good evening," he said quietly, in answer to my salutation. I looked into his face--a face I knew when a boy, a face familiar to the law-makers of Victoria for a quarter century. I called him by name. At the sound of his own name his paleness turned to an ashy yellow. "In Heaven's name," I said, "what are you doing here?" He looked at me with an expression of excruciating pain on his face, and said: "I have traveled some thousands of miles in order to be alone; if you have any kindness, any pity, leave me." "Pardon me," I said, "for intruding." That night the Ex-Club invited him to take part in their deliberations. He refused, and his manner showed that he considered the invitation an insult.