"Stay at least a little longer, lest the fête we are organising in your honour should fall through," exhorted Karl Engelbert, the young host, as soon as he could make his voice heard above the hubbub. Baumgart turned to him with a quick gesture of inquiry. "In _my_ honour?" he exclaimed. "Are you mad?" "There's no getting out of it now," was the answer. "It was all settled the day you turned up here. I despatched Johann Radtke at once with a list of all the Jägers in the country round who are at home. Then, you know, we have representatives of six or seven regiments living about here.... Especially did I impress on him that he was to go to Schranden, where Merckel lives. Merckel," he added, "went over to the Landwehr, too; for if he hadn't, he couldn't have made sure of his lieutenancy. So there was more sense in his taking the step." Baumgart at the mention of his name winced, but quickly recovering himself, gripped convulsively the arms of the battered easy-chair, and, with head bowed, listened in silence to what his well-meaning friends had to say about the gala-day arranged in his honour. He gave up protesting further, because he saw open resistance was useless. But the uneasy glances he cast about him seemed to indicate that he was meditating immediate flight. His friends, however, did not observe his restlessness. After the excitement of war which had stirred their blood out of its normal channel, they found it irksome to subside into the ordinary routine of private life, and hailed with delight any excuse for varying its monotony with a few hours' roistering and dissipation. They were now engaged in eagerly discussing the result of their messenger's mission, whose return from Schranden, a few miles away, they had been expecting hourly all the morning. "I wonder," said Peter Negenthin, the youth with the black sling, "how the Schrandeners are getting on with that fine landlord of theirs?" Lieutenant Baumgart started and listened with all his ears. "They set his house on fire long ago," remarked another. "For five years he's been roosting among the blackened ruins like an owl." "Why didn't he build his castle up again?" asked a third. "Why? Because the peasants and farmers down in the village would have thrashed any one at the cart-wheel who dared to work for him. Once he tried getting labourers over from his foreign estates, thinking that as they couldn't understand German it would be all right; ... but there was a free fight one day down at the inn, and heigh presto!--the Poles were hounded back to where they came from. Since then he hasn't made any more attempts to cultivate his land." "How does he live then? "Who cares how he lives! Let him starve."