permission was willingly granted; after the lamp was brought, for it was
later than usual, and we had settled ourselves on the sofa, the colonel
stroked his moustache for some time, and began, after he had gazed
quietly before him for a moment: "To-day my story shall be called, 'The
Nuts.' Does that please you, Hermy?"

The little one smiled at him expectantly and nodded his head. The
colonel continued:

"You believe, no doubt, children, that no one ever came back from the
dead, and that therefore no mortal knows what Heaven looks like, nor
Hell. But I--look at me well--I can tell you something about it."

Here he made a short pause while my wife handed him his pipe and a match.
The children looked at one another in doubt and suspicion, for this was
the first story of the colonel which had not begun with, "Here I am," or,
"Once upon a time," and they were consequently uncertain whether it was a
true story or one that he had made up. Wolfgang, who is thirteen and my
oldest boy, and who already calls his younger brothers, "the young ones,"
--and promises to be a true child of the times, inclined to believe it
the latter, but even he sat up straighter and looked puzzled as the
colonel continued:

"The two balls that I have in here, and the sabre cut on my shoulder,--
but you know how and where I received them--to be brief, I sank from my
horse onto the grass in the afternoon, and not until the following
morning was I found by the ambulance corps and carried to the hospital.
There they brought me to life again. In the interim--which lasted for
the half of a day and one whole night--I was certainly not alive like one
of you, or any other two-legged creature endowed with five senses."