out of the grave.  I re-lived my whole conscious life from my babyhood up to this very day.  You can imagine what a medley it was of nurses, military expeditions, cramming for examinations, confirmations, birthdays, marriages, sick-beds and death-beds.  At the end I went through the whole sinking of the Roland again.  And when you called me, I heard you in spite of my paralysed condition, but I saw you coming out of an inn on the quay of the little harbour where Columbus’s flag-ship was slowly decaying.”

“All right, all right, Friedericus Rex,” Peter Schmidt soothed him.  Friedericus Rex had been Frederick’s nickname at the university.  “Never mind,” Peter continued, in a tone clearly revealing that he took Frederick’s dreams to be a symptom of his over-wrought nerves.  “Don’t think of it, don’t think of anything, old man.  Let your ganglion cells rest.”

Frederick assured Peter that he felt like one newly arisen to a new world and had rested better than he had for years.  While they walked on together, Peter Schmidt tried to speak only of the mechanical, physiological causes of the attack.  After a while, the friends regained their old liveliness and began to talk of other things.  From now on, Peter Schmidt was careful never to mention the sinking of the Roland in Frederick’s presence.

VII

“We are near Ritter’s studio,” Schmidt said.  “If you like, we might drop in for a while.”

Frederick agreed, again begging his friend not to refer to his nervous attack.

“It was very astute of me, or of the wire-puller above us, to postpone my fit until the very moment you were with me,” he said.

Several times within the next few hours, Schmidt had occasion to be struck by Frederick’s evident belief in predestination and the superstition that clung to him from his crossing of the Atlantic.

The street that Bonifacius Ritter’s studios were on adjoined Central Park.  In the first room, a man in a round paper cap of his own making was at work taking a plaster cast of a man.  His cap and his smock and trousers, or as much of his trousers as showed from under his smock and above his slippers, were covered with hardened daubs of clay.  Death-masks, casts of antique statues, and anatomical studies of the human body, in whole or part, hung on all the walls.  When the workman left the room to announce the visitors the model, whose upper body, nude to the hips, showed the brawny development of an athlete, began to speak to Frederick and Peter.

“What won’t a man do to earn his bit of daily bread!” he said.  “I am from Pirna”—­he pronounced it “Berna,” speaking in a round Saxon dialect—­“and I tell you, it’s no joke for fellows like me in this damned New York.  At first I earned my living as a professional strong man.  Then my boss failed, and I had to give up my outfit, my iron bars and my weights and everything I needed for my job.  I can carry twelve hundred pounds on my stomach.”