"Pardon me, Douglas," she said, and there was a break in her voice. I felt the ocean of tears rising about me, and feared that I could not find the words fittingly to answer. For the pain had made me weak.
"Nay," I said at last, just over my breath, "it was my folly. Forgive me, little Saint Lucy of the Eyes! It was--it was--what was it that it was?--I have forgotten--"
"An error in judgment!" said Saint Lucy of the Eyes, and forgave me, though I cannot remember more about it.
I suppose I could take the title if I chose, for these things are easily arranged in Italy; but Lucia and I think it will keep for the second Stephen Douglas.
_What of the night, O Antwerp bells, Over the city swinging, Plaintive and sad, O kingly bells, In the winter midnight ringing?_
_And the winds in the belfry moan From the sand-dunes waste and lone, And these are the words they say, The turreted bells and they--_
_"Calamtout, Krabbendyk, Calloo," Say the noisy, turbulent crew; "Jabbeké, Chaam, Waterloo; Hoggerhaed, Sandvaet, Lilloo, We are weary, a-weary of you! We sigh for the hills of snow, For the hills where the hunters go, For the Matterhorn, Wetterhorn, Dom, For the Dom! Dom! Dom! For the summer sun and the rustling corn, And the pleasant vales of the Rhineland valley_."
I am writing this for my friend in Scotland, whose strange name I cannot spell. He wishes to, put it in the story-book he is writing. But his book is mostly lies. This is truth. I saw these things, and I write them down now because of the love I have for him, the young Herr who saved my brother's life among the black men in Egypt. Did I tell how our Fritz went away to be Gordon's man in the Soudan of Africa, and how he wrote to our father and the mother at home in the village--"I am a great man and the intendant of a military station, and have soldiers under me, and he who is our general is hardly a man. He has no fear, and death is to him as life"? So this young Herr, whom I love the same as my own brother, met Fritz when there was not the thickness of a Wurst-skin between him and the torture that makes men blanch for thinking on, and I will now tell you the story of how he saved him. It was--
But the Herr has come in, and says that I am a "dumbhead," also condemned, and many other things, because, he says, I can never tell anything that I begin to tell straightforwardly like a street in Berlin. He says my talk is crooked like the "Philosophers' Way" after one passes the red sawdust of the Hirsch-Gasse, where the youngsters "drum" and "drum" all the Tuesdays and the Fridays, like the donkeys that they are. I am to talk (he says violently) about Paris and the terrible time I saw there in the war of Seventy.