“Starve!” said Ernest Clare. “Ah! Mrs. Richards shakes her head, she thinks me a terrible fanatic; but only because she doesn’t understand that every age has its own battles to fight, and this against Mammon is ours. I see a very pretty little bronze statuette of the flying Mercury on the bracket yonder, Mrs. Richards, and there is a head of the Capitoline Jove on my own mantel-piece, which I value exceedingly. Yet what would a Christian of the first century have thought of possessing such images? they who would not sit at meat in an idol’s temple, and died in agony rather than offer one grain of incense before an idol’s altar! That, you see, was _their_ battle. Mammon is _our_ enemy. Truly ‘an idol is nothing in this world; and there is none other God but one’; _yet_, ‘if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.’” He was silent for a moment; for the look exchanged between husband and wife told him that he had spoken more wisely than he knew. Then Dr. Richards said lightly,— “Well, if ever I turn Christian, Mr. Clare, you shall have the glory of my conversion.” CHAPTER VIII. RITTER FRITZ. One afternoon late in the summer, Mr. Clare and Dr. Richards, accompanied by a large party of boys and young men, including Freddy and the Ark of the Covenant, had climbed a rather steep road which led to one of their favorite resorts, a quaint and beautiful cemetery on a hill overlooking the river. The names, the German inscriptions, the artificial flowers, the child’s toys upon the smaller graves, the beautiful river flowing beneath—“It is all a mistake,” said Dr. Richards, smiling; “this is not practical, humdrum America; we are in Germany, the home of myth and song, and yonder flows the mysterious and beautiful Rhine. I am positive there is a ruined castle just at the turn of the hill yonder; and, if you listen, you will hear the song of the Lorelei.” “I hope not,” replied Mr. Clare, so seriously that the others looked at him in surprise, perceiving which he went on more lightly, “There’s a song of the kind to be heard even in humdrum America, boys; and I confess to a terrible fear lest some of us should some day listen to it. A song that promises wealth and happiness to everybody at the cost of only a little bloodshed and violence. ‘All these things will I give thee,’ says Satan to us, as once to our Master, ‘if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’ And don’t you suppose it was a real temptation? to blot out the ‘two thousand years of wrong’ through which the world has waited, and to establish then and there the kingdom for which we still look?” “That’s a new explanation of that temptation,” observed Dr. Richards, who never let fall a syllable that could lessen or hinder Mr. Clare’s influence over his “boys.”