“No, I have never noticed that,” Ritz replied.  “But it is all right, for then he can do everything he wants to and also make fine weather.”

“Oh, Ritz, you only look at the profit! but just look at the other side.”  Here Edi rose up in bed from pure zeal and continued:  “Do you remember, not long ago I recited our songs, which we made about the others, to Papa; then he knew at once that we were preparing a big fight and has forbidden us to take part in it.  And this evening they all have talked it over that I should lead the boys of Upper Wood into battle, and I have thought it all over and prepared ahead.  Then I would be Fabius Cunctator, and would lead my troops above on the hill round and round it and would not attack, for you must know that is much safer, and so Hannibal could do nothing and could not attack me.”

“Is Hannibal still living then?” asked Ritz serenely.

“Oh, Ritz, how indescribably ignorant you are!” Edi remarked compassionately.  “He died more than a thousand years ago.  But big Churi, the leader of the Middle Lotters, our enemies, is Hannibal.  But you see, I just remember something:  Churi is not a real Hannibal, for he was a great and noble general, and Churi cannot represent him; but do you know what, we can take the strange boy Erick, for Hannibal!—­he looks quite different from Churi,—­shall we?”

“That is all the same to me since we cannot be in the fight,” remarked Ritz.

“That is true, we dare not, I had quite forgotten that,” lamented Edi.  “If I only knew what we could do to be in this fight and yet not do anything that is forbidden.”

“Don’t you know an example in the world’s history?” asked Ritz, to whom his brother presented so often, in cases of need, examples out of this rich fountain.

“No.  If we only lived like the old Greeks,” Edi answered with a deep sigh.  “When they wanted to know anything of which no one knew the answer, they quickly drove to Delphi to the oracle and asked advice.  Then there was an answer at once and they knew what was to be done.  But now there are no more oracles, not even in Greece.  Isn’t that too bad?”

“Yes, that is too bad,” said Ritz rather sleepily, “but I am sure you will think of another example.”

Edi began at once to think, but however much he thought, and groped in his memory and upheaved what he had stored away in his brain, he could not find in the whole history of the world one single case where some one had carried out something that the father had forbidden, and yet stood afterwards with honor before him.  For that was what Edi was trying to find; and he was sitting straight up in his bed in the dark, and in spite of all his endeavors he could find no way out.  And when he now heard the deep breathing of the sweetly sleeping Ritz, he became too discouraged to try any more.  He lay down on his pillow and was soon dreaming about the uniform of Fabius Cunctator.