[Illustration: THE SEDILIUM AT THE CASTLE.]

"See!" he said, "I have made a new chair. It is the highest evidence of
my love for my Teutonic friend. You have now a right to this castle. You
shall be perpetually welcome. I said to myself, German scholarship shall
sit there, and the Backwoods Philosopher will sit here. So sit down on
my _sedilium_, and let us hear how this uncivil and inconstant world
treats you. It can not deal worse with you than it has with me. But I
have had my revenge on it! I have been revenged! I have done as I
pleased, and defied the world and all its hollow conventionalities."
These last words were spoken in a tone of misanthropic bitterness common
to Andrew. His love for August was the more intense that it stood upon a
background of general dislike, if not for the world, at least for that
portion of it which most immediately surrounded him.

August took the chair, ingeniously woven and built of rye straw and
hickory splints. He knew that all this formality and apparent pedantry
was superficial. He and Andrew were bosom friends, and as he had often
opened his heart to the master of the castle before, so now he had no
difficulty in telling him his troubles, scarcely heeding the appropriate
quotations which Andrew made from time to time by way of embellishment.



CHAPTER VI.

THE BACKWOODS PHILOSOPHER.

One reason for Andrew's love of August Wehle was that he was a German.
Far from sharing in the prejudices of his neighbors against foreigners,