“I can’t say more exactly than that, for I paid no attention to the gentlemen till I was told to arrest them.”

“Is it your opinion that Herr Patke could have heard distinctly what the gentlemen were saying to one another?”

“I dare say he might have understood if they spoke very loud, but I can’t say for certain.”

“Herr Patke, what have you to say?”

The former non-commissioned officer, who had donned his 1870 medal for the occasion, hereupon assumed a strictly military bearing, fixed his eye firmly on the magistrate, and began in a sing-song voice: 

“I happened to be in the street last Sunday when the infamous wretch lifted his murderous hand against the sacred person of our august monarch.  My heart bled; I was beside myself; I could have torn everybody and everything to pieces.  As I walked along I noticed these two gentlemen, who looked to me suspicious from the first—­”

“Why?” asked the magistrate.

“Well—­the one with his black hair, and the other with his hooked nose—­I said to myself, ‘Those are Jews!’”

The magistrate suddenly bent over his papers, and gave a kind of grunt.  Even the policeman, in spite of his wooden official air, could not repress a smile.  Patke continued: 

“Then I heard the younger gentleman say, ’It serves his majesty the emperor quite right.’”

“Did he actually say, his majesty the emperor?” interrupted the magistrate.

“No,” answered Patke eagerly, “I say that.”

“You are only to repeat the gentleman’s actual words.”

“He actually did say that it served the emperor right.”

“This is beyond a joke,” Schrotter burst out.  “Why, man, I wonder the lie does not stick in your throat and choke you!”

“I must beg you not to address the witness,” said the magistrate brusquely.  Then to Patke severely—­“That is not what you said in your first charge.”

“I was confused then; I did not recollect distinctly.  But later on it came back to me.”

“That is very improbable.  What have you to answer, Dr. Eynhardt?”

“Simply, that the man’s statement is absolutely untrue.  I never uttered or thought words bearing the remotest resemblance to those he quotes.”

“What my friend does not say is,” broke in Schrotter, “that, on the contrary, he expressed the deepest and most painful emotion at the crime.”

The magistrate shot a venomous glance from under his spectacles at Schrotter, but quailed before those flaming half-closed blue eyes fixed so sternly upon him.

“Well, and what have you to bring forward against the other gentleman?”

“That gentleman said the outrage was of no great importance.”

“In your first account you said the outrage had no real significance, and that Dr. Eynhardt made the remark.”

“Whether he said ‘no importance’ or ‘no significance,’ it is all the same thing, and one cannot so easily distinguish the speaker when one is walking behind.  I may have been mistaken on that point.”