put upon her during the secret proceedings was such that at last she had been forced into a confession. She could not but repeat her avowal in my presence. I then took the whole responsibility upon myself. With a quieter mind, though well conscious of the position I now was in, I awaited the consequences.

We had been confronted but a few minutes. I was then led back to my prison-mates, the murderer and the thief. The low, narrow cell, which I inhabited with them, had its outlook upon a small kitchen-garden and orchard. An apple-tree stood close to the wall, which was not very high. Often the thought struck me that friendly rescuers might easily, during a dark night, get upon that wall with a ladder, or even by standing upon each other's shoulders, and then use the tree for descending into the garden. If a file, or a watch-spring, perhaps hidden in the cover of a book, could be sent in, and a stealthy hint be given me by a visitor as to its hiding-place, a probably successful attempt at breaking through the cross-bars might be made; the cell being on the first floor. As to Friederike, her release was now easily to be foreseen. Indeed, it came shortly afterward.

Remarkably enough, I often thought, in the mood I was then in, of a trusty and bold University friend, young Schlöffel, the son of a prominent Silesian patriot and later member of the German National Assembly, and himself of the most advanced views. He, I imagined, might possibly occupy himself with such a venture. When at night there was a strange cracking noise in the branches of the apple-tree, I sometimes rapidly rose in the expectation of friendly help having come. None who has not gone through such experiences can imagine the strong hold which the idea of escape has, off and on, upon the mind of the captive, and how suddenly hope then grows to be followed, perhaps, as quickly by deep despair. Between such musings, the plan of continuing a secret propaganda by pamphlets, if I were to escape, occupied me all the time. As Hans Sachs sings: The heart of man is like unto a mill.”

66

At Frankenthal, there appeared to be no watch kept, day or night, on that side of the prison. Young Schlöffel, however did not appear. Yet my thought of him was like a presentiment of what happened a little more than a year and a half afterward. Then he actually came at the head of a body of rescuers, in the midst of a new revolution, in which the people and the army made common cause for upholding, against perjured princes, the constitution framed by the German Parliament. On that occasion, I, together with Gustav von Struve and Adalbert von Bornstedt, were freed, in the very nick of time; Struve and myself having, in the gray dawn of morning, been fetched from the casemates of Rastatt, where we had been kept eight months, to be transported to the Federal fortress of Mainz. Had we been brought there, our fate would have been sealed.

The sentimental, nay, even the humorous element, which is seldom wanting in tragic events, also played its part in two cases at Frankenthal. The Director's daughter, a good, sweet girl, when gathering vegetables or flowers in the garden, each time made a little nosegay, and, looking kindly through the bars of my cell, silently placed it on the window sill for me, as a token of sympathy. The turnkey, knowing well who brought these floral gifts, never questioned me about them. Nor did the Director, when I took such a bouquet with me into the courtyard. The cell of Friederike, I must here explain, was on the second story. It had its outlook upon the courtyard and upon an opposite building in which officials resided. That building had a gallerywith creepers and other foliage round it, which in that autumn had turned into splendid purple-red and golden colors.

As the Director had latterly let me walk about in the courtvard by myself, quite alone, I once espied such an opportunity. Seeing Friederike look down from her window, I put a few lines of encouragement, which I had written, into the nosegay, and threw it up toward her window. Before doing so, I gave her to understand by signs that I conveyed a message.

She caught the flowers, read the message, and rapidly secreted the paper, when in rushed a turnkey. He, after all, had seen, unobserved by me, that I had thrown a bouquet. Still, he was unaware of its concealed contents. Though fumbling about it, he did not find anything.

From that day the supervision of my walks in the courtyard was stricter. Occasionally, I had to be there with the common criminals, when a warder of specially grim and malicious aspect kept watch, in whom hatred of the human kind was written in every lineament of the face.

Early in November, after a more than two months' imprisonment, Friederike was released; the case against her being judicially dismissed. I was then put into another cell, this time with a young peasant who was charged with some minor offence. It was the cell from which Dr. Siebenpfeiffer, a distinguished patriotic leader in the thirties, had escaped in 1833. He had been accused of high treason on account of his participation in the great mass meeting at Hambach, but declared not guilty by the jury at Landau. Nevertheless he was kept in prison under pretence of his having committed some other political offence against officials. Under that charge he was condemned by judges nominated by the government, before a Tribunal. of Correctional Police, to two years' imprisonment! Such were the devices then of tyrannical kingship.

Dr.

Siebenpfeiffer made his escape, however, through the chimney. He reached Switzerland safely, where he received an appointment as Professor at the University of Berne. The chimney was thereupon so altered that escape through it became impossible.

In conversation with the Director I was told now that my case would, no doubt, come before the Assizes at Zweibrücken. I mentally prepared myself for that eventuality, being resolved upon speaking before the jury in such manner as to place the Royal Government, and all German kingship, in the position of the rightfully accused

as enemies of the freedom and union of the German nation. Such attack, I fancied, would be the best defence; and perchance I would carry the jury with me.

Great was my astonishment when one morning I was informed that the Chamber of Accusation had dismissed my case, too. I scarcely trusted my ears. I could only explain it, partly from strong sympathy with Liberal aspirations among the judicial body itself; partly-and most probably, in a higher degree-from a fear of Government lest the trial at Zweibrücken should, as in the case of Dr. Siebenpfeiffer and Dr. Wirth, end in a verdict of not guilty. Such an issue would certainly have been a public scandalthat is to say, for the authority of Government. A revolutionary spirit was already vaguely abroad; and such a scandal had to be avoided by all

means.

Thus, strangely enough, I also became free in November. Having made a present of a book of poetry to the Director's amiable daughter, with a dedication, and given a substantial gratification to a warder who had proved very kind, I took a carriage and drove to Mannheim, where I arrived late at night at my father's house.

Great was the astonishment there when I so unexpectedly appeared. I then learned that, after I had been arrested in the Palatinate, an order had been given in Baden to search his house. So ridiculously severe was the search that linen lying in a bucking tub was turned out, in order to see whether revolutionary pamphlets and such like things were not concealed in it. A very likely place indeed. Shortly before leaving Mannheim for Dürkheim, I had, however, deposited all my belongings and manuscripts in the rooms of the friend who had given me Heinzen's pamphlets. This the police did not know.

Thinking of the possibility of a renewed domiciliary visit, I, in a fit of anger, destroyed all my manuscripts in the flames of the stove. Among them were a great number of poems of my

school and University days. Many Many years afterward, in the seventies, I learned from one of my best University friends, the poet Ludwig Eichrodt, who occupied the post of a judge under the Grand Ducal Government, that he had preserved some of those early productions, and published several of them, without my knowledge, in his Hortus Deliciarum and in the Lahrer Kommersbuch for students. Others he gave, later on, in an anthology, entitled Gold. The responsibility for all this I must leave to him.

The three months' imprisonment had by no means cooled my zeal. An address to the Swiss Diet, as a congratulation for the victorious overthrow of the Sonderbund, was drawn up by me. and sent to Berne with numerous signatures. At the request of the editor of the Mannheimer Abendzeitung, the influential organ of the popular party, I went to Karlsruhe, where the Chambers were about to meet, there to edit a "Parliamentary Gazette" as a supplement, and to write commentaries on the course of affairs. In this

way I became acquainted with all the chief leaders of the Opposition.

Soon I was to learn that a new sword of Damocles had been suspended over my head. An inquest was instituted against me on account of a speech I had made in summer, before the arrest, in Rhenish Bavaria, at Heppenheim, during a festival of gymnastic associations. I had spoken there in an intimate circle, recommending our secret pamphlet propaganda, for which a small league of men had latterly met, at stated times, in the very town where the Federal Diet of Germany satnamely, at Frankfort-on-the-Main. That league was wholly composed of trusty friends, true as steel. At Heppenheim the circle had been widened a little; and there, manifestly, a traitor and informer had slipped in. However, the outbreak of the Revolution in March, 1848, quashed this new prosecu. tion for high treason. And now events followed with the rapidity of thunder and lightning, which presently cast the old state of things into the dust.-Cornhill Magazine.

IT was my lot to find myself, in the early spring of the year, in the south of France, close to one of the finest parts of the Pyrenees, and attracted by the curious fascination that draws people to places of pilgrimage, I paid one day a visit to Lourdes. There is a magic about places of reputed miracle even to people of the nineteenth century, and it is with this that the little town nestling at the base of the Pyrenees is invested.

A small town of some six thousand five hundred inhabitants, it is only within comparatively recent years that Lourdes has been known to the world. It depends for its interest on no historical association, on no commerce or manufactures, but simply and purely on the fact that, as late as 1858, a simple peasant girl alleged that she had been more than once visited by the Virgin. The story

goes that she had been engaged in her humble daily toil of gathering sticks when the Divine Mother had appeared to her, urging her to build a shrine for worship on the spot of her appearance. The vision was repeated, and news of the visions spread. They were soon the talk of the village. The peasants of the district were impressed. Their simple souls, inclined already to that superstition that haunts the vicinity of mountains and places where the light of education has not entered, fell an easy prey to the reports, and then to the representations of the priests. And these were not slow to recognize that here was virgin soil for the sowing of their seed.

How much they themselves believed in the alleged visions, and how far they set themselves to pervert the peasants' simplicity, it is difficult to say. They doubtless knew how thin a border

line separates superstition from belief in the supernatural. However that might be, tinder is not more easily ignited than were the peasants' unsophisticated minds by the reports of Bernadette Soubirous' vision.

The results were farther reaching than even the priests could have fore

seen.

Out of Bernadette's visions has arisen Lourdes as it now is-new Lourdes, large, bustling, modern-a famous place of pilgrimage for all France and for countries yet farther afield.

Our progress southward was slow enough. We seemed to wind through the valley, not verdant yet in its spring dress, but none the less picturesque by force of its contrast of vivid colors. Here and there we passed quaint, straggling, wayside villages: Bettharam and St. Pé, little out-of-the-world spots, whose bare, brown trees stood out in skeleton-like nakedness. The Pyrenees loomed more near as we advanced, seeming to approach almost to their base; their snow-capped peaks in some places almost merging with the sky, stood out in strong relief to their bare black sides. The Gave, with its turbid. waters green and swollen, wound along the valley at our feet. There was a sharply defined contrast all around in the landscape-winter's blackness contending, as it were, with the approach of budding spring-that was not without a beauty of its own.

On reaching Lourdes we turned out of the station, to find the town, divided into two, lying beneath us. On our right was new Lourdes, called into being, as it were, at the voice of Bernadette, risen Phoenix-like from the ashes of the old-white, dazzling, jarringly modern, with its churches and convents and hotels, insignia of nineteenth-century life and progress. On our left lay old Lourdes, primitive Lourdes, with its gray subdued tones and colors, and towering above all its ancient castle, now ruined, but with that frown that ruins often retain long after their glory has departed. Standing sentinel-wise on a natural eminence, it recalled the days when it had held the key to all the val

ley, and its splendid fortifications had resisted the attacks of the English as far back as the Middle Ages. It stands now, ivy-covered, but beneath the green mantle, gaunt and crippled, somewhat pathetic in its dethronement.

We crossed the Gave and took the way to the miraculous grotto. A squalid enough road, but to our minds hallowed by reason of the incarnate hopes and fears that had trod that way before. For every year thousands of pilgrims, some in hope, some in fear, all bowed down by plague and disease and sickness, have traversed this way, knowing that at the end lay their fate's decision.

At first the grotto was dwarfed and lost sight of as we entered the large open square, laid out in parterres, to be gay by-and-by with colored flowers, and railed in by decorative iron railings, the entrance to the magnificent churches that have been reared on the site of Bernadette's childish vision. In the square is a statue of the Virgin royally crowned in gold, and one of St. Michael. But we passed these cursorily, for the grotto held for us supremest interest. As we turned to the right of the church we came upon it in a rock beside the river.

It was a scene so unexpected as to be at first sight almost disappointing. One had pictured a lonely pool, a Bethesda, to whose rocky sides the halt, the maimed, the blind should come, waiting for the healing of the waters. But the Bethesda pool had been dissected and twisted and distorted, like some natural thing trained to artificial ways, till it was almost beyond recognition. There was, it is true, as at the first, the natural cave or grotto in the side of the rock. That had not been altered or destroyed, but its blackness and darkness were illumined in a manner that reminded one of some scene from fairyland. In the centre of the space below, covered with a white pavement, a very pyramid of roses reared itself, the artificial pink blossoms converging to a point. On all sides of this mound of roses gleamed forth candles; candles dazzling white, of all sizes and shapes and thicknesses, whose brightness light

ed vividly the blackness of the rocky background and the gorgeous coloring of the pink blossoms. An iron railing with an open gate enclosed the grotto, above which were the words: "On est prié de garder le silence."

Prie-Dieu chairs stood here and there inside the enclosure, and just outside the railing were ranged a number of chairs and benches. Looking tranquilly down from a natural alcove in the rock was a statue of the Virgin, the gracious "Lady of Lourdes," as the little peasant girl is supposed to have seen her, clad all in white, with a blue scarf round her waist and a rosary attached. Wreathed about the head in large letters of silver were the words, "Je suis l'Immaculée Conception."

Candles burned at the feet of the Virgin, lighting up offerings in the shape of flowers-magnificent structures of hothouse exotics, skeletons of humbler bouquets, simple bunches of common flowers, shrunken, withered, speaking pathetically of the donors. In the distance a basket of papers and letters held acknowledgments of cures effected by the Blessed Virgin, or contained substantial recognition in the shape of money.

Before the railings kneeled a class of children chanting the Litany. There was the illumined grotto, its black, rocky, resonant sides contrasting sharply with the dazzling whiteness of the Virgin's robes. Behind us flowed the Gave, full and green and deep. To our right stretched an avenue of leafless poplars, slenderly silhouetted against the gray sky, and converging to a point in the distance. In our ears was the sound of trickling water as it issued from the miraculous spring at our feet, and the hum of infant voices as they rose and struck and echoed from the black vaulted roof of the grotto in the monotony of their childish petitions.

"Sainte Marie, mère de Jésus, priez pour nous, pauvres pécheurs." The words rose and fell with a rhythmic murmur, the effect being little short of overpowering in the stillness and surroundings. What it must be in times of pilgrimage, the combined voice of the multitude of men and women and

children, wretched, diseased, plaguestricken, their hearts sore, while their lips sing, it is not easy to conceive.

Above the spring were the words, "Allez boire à la fontaine et y laver. 25 Février, 1858."

After the chanting, each child stepped down to the spring and received water in a cup, first making the sign of the cross on his or her little forehead with one wet finger dipped in the cup, and then drinking of the healing

water.

Fringing the front of the grotto's roof, and mantling its stony sides, were, even at this early season, luxuriant trails of ivy, and suspended beneath these were innumerable tokens to remind us of the sick and the suffering who had found healing in the miraculous waters. There were wooden crutches, leg-rests, sticks and staffs, and arm-splints, gray with the accumulated dust of years, whose owners had presumably come halt and maimed, and left sound of body and rejoicing.

Into the pavement-an innovation since the days of the simple surroundings when Bernadette saw her childish vision-is let a square, indicating the exact spot where the Virgin is supposed to have appeared to the child, in these words

Place où priait
Bernadette

le 11 Février
1858.

And again, in another square, are graven these words

Ancien cour du canal.

Although there was no regular pilgrimage at that season of the yearno crowd, as in summer, of wretched sufferers, praying and pleading, cast into the depths of despair by the Virgin's silence, or transported into ecstasy by some token of her favor-no maimed, fevered, pestilential multitude from far and near, attracted irresistibly by hope-there were yet not wanting pathetic enough worshippers. People kneeled and stood around; some at the feet of the statue, as if to gain inspiration from it, looking up into the face of the inanimate figure with a very