What I think of your character I should not be permitted to tell you. I know that men of real character find any praise of their characteristics disagreeable. At any rate I may say in brief that I admire the German writer who has the courage to-day to create the figures of a Gutfeld, Zinzler, and Kölble. Artistically your novel stands high. Perhaps there are too many threads interwoven, and the web is, perhaps, not drawn tight enough. That the main drama is not introduced until the last chapters, with the appearance of Palkowski, is no advantage from the standpoint of composition; but all that is a trifle compared to the great advantage of its wealth of motives and the vital energy of the complicated multitude of personages. Old Jörgen alone would suffice to make your novel ever fresh in the reader’s memory. At that time I was writing _Vor dem Gewitter_. The editorial work on my monthly periodical likewise gave me abundant occupation, and my correspondence even more. I wrote regularly to Alfred Nobel in order to keep him informed as to the development of the peace cause. I constantly had long, stimulating letters from Carneri as well as from Rudolf Hoyos, Friedrich Bodenstedt, Spielhagen, Karl von Scherzer, M. G. Conrad, and others. I found a new, and to me personally unknown, correspondent in an old French naval officer, Rear Admiral Réveillère. I cannot now remember whether he wrote to me first or I to him. Whether or no, our correspondence was based on similarity of ideas and a mutual knowledge of each other’s writings. The first time I ever heard of Réveillère was at the banquet of the Interparliamentary Conference of 1894, at Scheveningen, when Frédéric Passy, in proposing a toast to the sea which was roaring beyond the doors of the hall, said he was quoting the words of his friend Réveillère. Born in 1828, in Brittany, he had long followed the sea, and now was living in retirement in Brest, his native city, known to fame as a savant and a writer. He occupied his leisure time in writing books and articles. He had participated in many naval battles and many battles of ideas. The list of the titles of his books shows to how many countries he had traveled in the performance of his duties, and also how manifold were the regions which he had explored as a poet and thinker: “Gaul and the Gauls,” “The Enigma of Nature,” “Across the Unknown,” “The Voices of the Rocks,” “Journey Around the World,” “Seeds and Embryos,” “Against Storm and Flood,” “The Three Promontories,” “Letters of a Mariner,” “Tales and Stories,” “The Indian Seas,” “The Chinese Seas,” “The Conquest of the Ocean,” “The Search for the Ideal”; still later came “United Europe” (Paris, Berger Levraut, 1896), “Guardianship and Anarchy” (Ibid., 1896), “Extension, Expansion” (Ibid., 1898). He wrote me once how it happened that he, the son of conservative Brittany, grown gray in the naval service, had joined the pacifists: