“Then creeps close the hour for the guns.  My tongue is fast and cannot move; my brow is wet and frozen is my blood.

“Boom! go the guns; then thunder shakes the castle, lightning flashes through the draperies, and I fall as dead.

“Was I in a dream?  I know not.  I did not believe in God; I did not believe in heaven or in hell; yet do I see my past life go past me in pictures—­pictures of light in frames of fire:  Two boys, first—­Max, my brother, and I, playing as children; then my mother weeping for great sorrow; then the black walls of the great fortress—­my brother with arms outstretched.  Again my blood is frozen, again creeps my skin, and I hear the volley and see him fall to death.  I fear.  I scream loud that I love the King, but in my ear comes a voice like iron—­’Liar!’ A little girl, then, with hair so golden, comes and wipes the stain of blood from my brow.  I see her plain.

“Then I awake.  I am alone; the light is out; blood is on my face.  I am paralyzed with fear, so I cannot stand.  When I can walk, I leave, for I think maybe that only in Germany do I hear the guns.  For twenty years I live in Spain.  Still do I hear the guns.

“I go to France, but yet every night at the same hour freezes my blood and I hear the death volley.

“I come to America, which I have hated, yet never a night is missed.  It is at the same hour.  What I hate comes to me.  Whatever I fear is mine.  To run away from something is for me to meet it.  My estate is gone; money I have not.  I sink like a man in a quicksand, down, down, down.  I come here.  Lower I cannot.

“One day in ‘the Bend’, where das Gesindel live, I see the little girl—­she of the golden hair who wiped my stain away.

“But she is dead.  I know for sure the face.  What it means I know not.  Again I fall as dead.

“I have one thing in the world left—­only one; it is my scissors-grinder.  I sell it and give all the money to bury her.  It is the first—­it is the only good I ever did.  Then, an outcast, I go out into the world where no pity is.  I sit me down in a dark alley; strange is my heart, and new.

“It is time for the guns—­yet is my blood warm!  I wait.  The volley comes not!

“The hour is past!

“‘My Gott, my Gott!’ I say.  ‘Can this be true?’ I wait one, two, three minutes; it comes not.  I scream for joy—­I scream loud!  I feel an iron hand on me.  I am put in prison.  Yet is the prison filled with light—­yet am I in heaven.  The guns are silent!”

One day a big letter with several patches of red sealing-wax and an aristocratic monogram arrived at the bunk-house.  Nearly two hundred men handled it and stood around until the Graf arrived.  Every one felt a personal interest in the contents.  It was “One-eyed Dutchy,” who handed it to the owner, and stood there watching out of his single eye the face of his former master.  The old man smiled as he folded the letter and put it into his pocket, saying as he did so:  “By next ship I leave for Hamburg to take life up where I laid it down.”