resolution before which every obstacle fades away. Was there ever a more
compositely polyglot cosmopolitan than poor young de Liefde--half
Dutchman, half German by birth, an Englishman by adoption, a Frenchman in
temperament, speaking with equal fluency the language of all four
countries, and an unconsidered trifle of some half-dozen European
languages besides? Then there was the English student from Bonn, who had
come down to the front accompanied by a terrible brute of a dog, vast,
shaggy, self-willed, and dirty; an animal which, so to speak, owned his
owner, and was so much the horror and disgust of everybody that on account
of him the company of his master--one of the pleasantest fellows alive--
was the source of general apprehension. There was young Silberer the
many-sided and eccentric, an Austrian nobleman, a Vienna feuilletonist and
correspondent, a rowing man, a gourmet, ever thinking of his stomach and
yet prepared for all the roughness of the campaign--warm-hearted,
passionate, narrow-minded, capable of sleeping for twenty-three out of the
twenty-four hours, and the wearer of a Scotch cap. There was Kuester, a
German journalist with an address somewhere in the Downham Road; and Duff,
a Fellow of ---- College, the strangest mixture of nervousness and cool
courage I ever met.

We were a kind of happy family at the Hagen; the tone of the coterie was
that of the easiest intimacy into which every newcomer slid quite
naturally. Thus when on the 31st July there was a somewhat sensational
arrival, the stolid landlord had not turned the gas on in the empty saal
before everybody knew and sympathised with the errand of the strangers.
The party consisted of a plump little girl of about eighteen with a bonny
round face and fine frank eyes; her sister who was some years older; and a
brother, the eldest of the three. They had come from Silesia on rather a
strange tryst. Little Minna Vogt had for her _Braeutigam_ a young Feldwebel
of the second battalion of the Hohenzollerns, a native of Saarlouis. The