“Indeed!”

“Yes!  It was such a tearful story!”

“Tell me what it is,” said the consul, with a faint hope that Karl had volunteered some communication of his past.

“Ach Gott!  There in America he was a man, and could ‘vote,’ make laws, and, God willing, become a town councilor,—­or Ober Intendant,—­and here he was nothing but a soldier for years.  And this America was a fine country.  Wunderschon?  There were such big cities, and one ’Booflo’—­could hold all Schlachtstadt, and had of people five hundred thousand!”

The consul sighed.  Karl had evidently not yet got off the line of the New York Central and Erie roads.  “But does he remember yet what he did with his papers?” said the consul persuasively.

“Ach!  What does he want with papers when he could make the laws?  They were dumb, stupid things—­these papers—­to him.”

“But his appetite remains good, I hope?” suggested the consul.

This closed the conversation, although Karl came on many other nights, and his toy figure quite supplanted the tall corporal of hussars in the remote shadows of the hall.  One night, however, the consul returned home from a visit to a neighboring town a day earlier than he was expected.  As he neared his house he was a little surprised to find the windows of his sitting-room lit up, and that there were no signs of Trudschen in the lower hall or passages.  He made his way upstairs in the dark and pushed open the door of his apartment.  To his astonishment, Karl was sitting comfortably in his own chair, his cap off before a student-lamp on the table, deeply engaged in apparent study.  So profound was his abstraction that it was a moment before he looked up, and the consul had a good look at his usually beaming and responsive face, which, however, now struck him as wearing a singular air of thought and concentration.  When their eyes at last met, he rose instantly and saluted, and his beaming smile returned.  But, either from his natural phlegm or extraordinary self-control he betrayed neither embarrassment nor alarm.

The explanation he gave was direct and simple.  Trudschen had gone out with the Corporal Fritz for a short walk, and had asked him to “keep house” during their absence.  He had no books, no papers, nothing to read in the barracks, and no chance to improve his mind.  He thought the Herr Consul would not object to his looking at his books.  The consul was touched; it was really a trivial indiscretion and as much Trudschen’s fault as Karl’s!  And if the poor fellow had any mind to improve,—­his recent attitude certainly suggested thought and reflection,—­the consul were a brute to reprove him.  He smiled pleasantly as Karl returned a stubby bit of pencil and some greasy memoranda to his breast pocket, and glanced at the table.  But to his surprise it was a large map that Karl had been studying, and, to his still greater surprise, a map of the consul’s own district.