He was alone.  Outside, lay the clear, silent winter’s night, the same that he had known in the home of his childhood.  The things he had hitherto experienced were no more, or as if they never had been.  His home, his parents, his wife, his children, the girl that had drawn him across the ocean, everything that had happened to him on his trip were nothing more in his soul than magic lantern pictures.

“Is life,” Frederick asked himself, “meant to be nothing more than material for dreams?  So much is certain, my present condition is the sort that leaves an everlasting effect.  We should not be unsociable, but we have still less right to leave this state uncultivated, which is the basic state of man’s personality, in which he is most natural and undisturbed and stands face to face with the mystery of life as though it were a dream.”

During the past months, he had led a life full of incidents of the extremest contrasts.  He had been alarmed, excited, menaced.  His own anguish had been submerged in the anguish of others, and their pangs had only increased his own.  From the ashes of a dead love, the flames of another passionate illusion had flared up.  Frederick had been driven, pursued, lured on, led about in the world, without a will of his own, like a puppy on a strap—­without a will of his own and with his senses departed.  Now at last his senses had returned.  And the senses return when the life that has been lived in an unconscious state becomes material for dreams to the mind in a conscious state.

Frederick took a sheet of paper, dipped a new American pen in a new inkwell of fresh ink, and wrote:  “Life:  Material for Dreams.”

He rose and again went about arranging his Robinson Crusoe household to suit his fancy.  He piled up books that he had got in New York, little Reclams and other volumes, among them a copy of Schleiermacher’s translation of Plato, which he had borrowed from Peter Schmidt.  In front of an old Dutch sofa covered in leather, which Lamping, the druggist, had brought over from Leyden, his birthplace, stood a large, round table.  Frederick covered the table with a green cloth and arranged the long-stemmed roses that the artists had given him in plain glass vases, placing Miss Burns’s roses by themselves.  Before Peter Schmidt had left, he and Frederick had taken a cup of coffee together.  Frederick now washed and cleared away the utensils, loaded a revolver that Schmidt had lent him, and placed it beside the inkstand on his writing table.  Next he took from his trunk a more peaceable instrument, a Zeiss microscope, examined all its parts, and set it up.  It was the microscope that he had selected years ago in Jena for his friend, Peter, when he was leaving for America.  Here was a remarkable meeting with the old instrument.