"Well, the long and short of it was that when I was striding along a ploughed path, between wheatears as tall as a man, my foot struck against something. It was the carcass of a horse which had fallen there. One comes across such a sight on the roads every fifty yards, and often it is not one dead horse only, but heaps of them. What struck me about this one was that they hadn't taken off its harness. It was still warm, and could have been dead scarcely twenty-four hours. Apparently it had belonged to the caravan of our expedition, and I resolved to give our guides a reminder for their negligence. Then as I contemplated this poor beast, that looked at me with wide-open, blue-grey eyes as if it were yet alive, there came into my head the saying of a man who endowed our squirearchy with new life, new strength, and new _morale_, words that he once spoke in the Reichstag--'A good horse dies in harness.' And all of a sudden I saw _you_ before me--you with your miserable skeleton body, who, with colossal energy, have had to wrestle for every inch of what you have become; you whom every half-fledged stripling could knock down, but whom the lowest drunkards among your tenants worship with as much reverence and awe as their God--you who were born to be anything but a country squire, and yet have so trained yourself to it that you have converted the old tumble-down heritage of your ancestors into a modern model estate--you who sit up at night poring over scientific books, and never weary of drinking in new knowledge--you who have given our constituency a name in the Reichstag (don't protest; I know. Even out there people sometimes read German newspapers). Yes, I saw you before me, labouring on without pause or rest, till the weak remnant of flesh that still hung on your bones was demanded as tribute. "'A good horse dies in harness,' I repeated over and over again to myself, and began to be just a little bit ashamed. And you see, for me to feel ashamed, when otherwise I was so well satisfied with myself, meant that there was something rotten somewhere. So, 'Egad!' said I to myself. 'Tilt with your thick skull against all obstacles, and be a damned steady fellow; and to begin your reformation at once you shall start for home at dawn of day.' And that same night, as a proof of my strong moral heroism, I drank the whole company (for the most part God-forsaken scum) under the table--at least I would have done so if there had been a table. When they were all lying in artistic attitudes on the grass I had my horse saddled, and with my two servants and the necessary provisions I began my gallop into space. The beasts sniffed in the morning air almost as if they scented the Halewitz stables. In three weeks I was at Buenos Ayres, in five at Hamburg ... eighteen hours later at the Prussian Crown, where I am sitting now. Come, drink another!" The glasses clinked, and Ulrich's eyes, radiant with pride, hung on his new-found friend.