The American spring had come early.  Suddenly the weather turned hot.  In that part of America the transition from winter to summer is very abrupt.  In the pools and lakes, the bullfrogs croaked in rivalry with the high, clear shrilling of the other American frogs.  Now came that unendurable combination of heat and humidity which Mrs. Schmidt so dreaded.  She suffered fearfully during the summer, when she continued with her hard work just as in winter.

Frederick began again to accompany Peter Schmidt on his professional rounds, and sometimes the friends took long excursions into the country.  They fell back into their old habit of revolving problems and pondering the destinies of mankind.  To his friend’s astonishment, Frederick did not display his old incisiveness in debate, whether in attack or defence.  There was a cheerful placidity about him which took the keenness from any hope or fear of a universal character upon which they touched in their discussions.

“How do you account for it?” asked Peter Schmidt.

“I think I have well earned the precious right merely to breathe, and I think I appreciate it.  What I want to do for the time being is smell, taste, and enjoy.  An Icarus flight does not suit my present condition, and with my newly awakened tender love for the superficial, you will scarcely find me ready to dig laboriously into the depths.  I am now a bourgeois.  I am done with my former state,” he concluded, smiling.

Peter Schmidt, as a practising physician, expressed his satisfaction with this mood of Frederick’s.

“To be sure,” he said, “you will change again.”

“Time will show, but I think not,” rejoined Frederick.

Indian lore had a fascination for Peter Schmidt.  He liked to go to certain spots in the hilly country to which history or legend attaches stories of the conflicts between the first white colonists and the Indians, and remain there a long time, mentally living over again the experiences of the fur trappers and the tenacious wrestling of the settlers for possession.  Sometimes, in a wave of warlike feeling, he would draw his revolver and shoot at a mark.  Frederick was no match for him as a marksman.

“The blood of the old German adventurers and colonists is flowing in your veins,” he said.  “A finished civilisation, over-ripe and over-refined such as ours, really does not suit you.  Where you ought to be is in a wilderness with a Utopia hovering above.”

“The world is still not much more than a wilderness,” said Peter.  “It will be quite a while before the structure of our cosmic philosophy will stand on a solid foundation.  In short, Frederick, much remains to be done.”

“Like the Lord God, I shall knead human beings from wet clay and inspire them with a living breath.”

“Stuff and nonsense!” said Peter Schmidt.  “Making dolls like that leads nowhere.  You are too good to be doing it.  You belong on the ramparts, in the front ranks of the battle line, my dear boy.”