CHAPTER VII.

THE BOOK.

In the morning the master of the house rapped on Leonhard’s door and said:  “When you come down I have something to show you.”  The voice of Mr. Loretz had almost its accustomed cheerfulness of tone, and he ended his remark with a brief “Ha! ha!” peculiar to him, which not only expressed his own good-humor, but also invited good-humored response.

Leonhard answered cheerily, and in a few moments he had descended the steep uncovered stair to the music-room.

“Now for the book,” Loretz called out as Leonhard entered.

How handsome our young friend looked as he stood there shaking hands with the elderly man, whose broad, florid face now actually shone with hospitable feeling!

“Is father going to claim you as one of us, Mr. Marten?” asked the wife of Loretz, who answered her husband’s call by coming into the room and bringing with her a large volume wrapped in chamois skin.

“What shall I be, then?” asked Leonhard.  “A wiser and a better man, I do not doubt.”

“What! you do not know?” the good woman stayed to say.  “Has nobody told you where you are, my young friend?”

“I never before found myself in a place I should like to stay in always; so what does the rest signify?” answered Leonhard.  “What’s in a name?”

“Not much perhaps, yet something,” said Loretz.  “We are all Moravians here.  I was going to look in this book here for the names of your ancestors.  I thought perhaps you knew about Spenersberg.”

“I am as new to it all as Christopher Columbus was to the West India islands.  If you find the names of my kinsmen down in your book, sir, it—­it will be a marvelous, happy sight for me,” said Leonhard.

“I’ll try my hand at it,” said Loretz.  “Ha! ha!” and he opened the volume, which was bound in black leather, the leaves yellowed with years.  “This book,” he continued, “is one hundred and fifty years old.  You will find recorded in it the names of all my grandfather’s friends, and all my father’s.  See, it is our way.  There are all the dates.  Where they lived, see, and where they died.  It is all down.  A man cannot feel himself cut off from his kind as long as he has a volume like that in his library.  I have added a few names of my own friends, and their birthdays.  Here, you see, is Sister Benigna’s, written with her own hand.  A most remarkable woman, sir.  True as steel—­always the same.  But”—­he paused a moment and looked at Leonhard with his head inclined to one side, and an expression of perplexity upon his face—­“there’s something out of the way here in this country.  I have not more than one name down to a dozen in my father’s record, and twenty in my grandfather’s.  We do not make friends, and we do not keep them, as they did in old time.  We don’t trust each other as men ought to.  Half the time we find ourselves wondering whether the folks we’re dealing with are honest.  Now think of that!”