you'd tell me, for I'm dazed, and I can't make out the reason of anything any more." In the same house a widow with three children,--the father killed by falling from a scaffolding,--earns sixty cents a day by making buttonholes, and above her is another well past sixty, whose trade and wages are the same. How they live, what they can wear, how they are fed, on this amount is yet to be told, but every detail waits; and having gathered them from these and other women in like case, I am not yet prepared to believe that they live at ease, or that the "hue and cry about so much destitution and misery, and the unscrupulous greed of employers, is groundless." CHAPTER EIGHTH. THE TRUE STORY OF LOTTE BAUER. It was the Prussian War that seemed to settle the question. So far as Grossvater Bauer himself was concerned, he would still have toiled on contentedly. To be alive at all on German soil was more than honor or wealth or any good thing that the emigrant might report as part of his possession in that America to which all discontented eyes looked longingly. The reports might all be true; yet why should one for the sake of better food or more money be banished from the Vaterland and have only a President, a man of the people, in place of the old Kaiser, whose very name thrilled the heart, and for whose glory Grossvater Bauer would have given many sons? He had given them. Peace had come, and France was paying tribute; and, one by one, the few who had escaped French bullets came home to the little Prussian village and told their tales of the siege and of the three who had fallen at Sedan. Grossvater Bauer sat silent. He had been as silent when they brought the news to him in the beginning. It was the fortune of war. He had served his own time, and having served it, accepted as part of his birthright the same necessity for his sons. They had worked side by side with him on the great farm where he had been for most of his life head laborer and almost master; worked contentedly until Annchen, the oldest daughter, had married a tailor, dissatisfied like all tailors, and set sail for the strange country where fortune had always open hands for all the world. He had prospered, and in Annchen's letters, coming at rare intervals, was always an appeal to them to come over. The boys listened; doubtfully at first, for the father's faith was strong in them that no land could ever hold the same good as this land through which the Rhine flowed to the sea. But as the time came when they must enter the army there was rebellion. Here and there, in the air it seemed, for no one could say from whence the new feeling had come, were questions the sound of which was not to be tolerated by any true Prussian. Why should this great army live on the toil of the peasant? Why should the maintenance of these conscripts swallow up every possible saving in the wages and be the largest item save one in the year's expenses? Why should there be a standing army at all?