Otto Littman was one of not a few prosperous young German-Americans who were caught in 1914, 1915, and 1916 in the coarse and rather clumsy web that German intrigue spun over spots in this land. Otto's trapping had begun at least half a dozen years before, when he had made his first visit to Germany. He was then twenty-four, a handsome, rather arrogant, excellently educated young man. Rupert Littman had done his best for his only son. He himself was the best of men. He had come here in the early fifties--a lad of ten or twelve, with his father, a refugee of the revolution of 1848. They had found their way to Cincinnati and finally to a farm near Sabinsport. The land had thrived under the elder Littman's intelligent and friendly touch. He was a prosperous man when the opening of the coal vein under his farm made him rich. He came into Sabinsport and with others, made rich like himself, started a farmers' bank. This bank Rupert had inherited, and it was to carry it on that he had educated Otto, sending him to Germany to the family he had not seen since childhood but with which he had always had a formal relation, with the understanding that he was to spend at least two years in studying German banking and commercial methods. The two years had lengthened to six, for Otto had been well received by his relatives. An opening had been found for him in Berlin where he had been given the opportunities his father sought for him. He had been cultivated by serious and older people, and always his relatives had lost no opportunity of impressing upon him the honors that were done him, of telling him that he was being taken in even as they were not. Otto had been flattered, though not so deeply as his relatives felt that he should have been. He had not taken the attentions and opportunities with an especial seriousness. There was a considerable percentage of inner conviction that they were his due, that there must be qualities in him that the attentive had detected which were not in others. Being an American meant something in Germany, he saw; also he soon discovered that there were two classes of his compatriots that Berlin cultivated--the millionaires and the professors. It is doubtful if Otto realized how very cunning this was on the part of Berlin. She had chosen the two classes of the United States most susceptible to flattery, and best placed to serve her purpose. And, how our millionaires and our professors had played her game!