It was two mornings later that Judge Whipple and Stephen drove to the Iron Mountain depot, where they found a German company of Home Guards drawn up.  On the long wooden platform under the sheds Stephen caught sight of Herr Korner and Herr Hauptmann amid a group of their countrymen.  Little Korner came forward to clasp his hands.  The tears ran on his cheeks, and he could not speak for emotion.  Judge Whipple, grim and silent, stood apart.  But he uncovered his head with the others when the train rolled in.  Reverently they entered a car where the pine boxes were piled one on another, and they bore out the earthly remains of Captain Carl Richter.

Far from the land of his birth, among those same oaks on Bloody Hill where brave Lyon fell, he had gladly given up his life for the new country and the new cause he had made his own.

That afternoon in the cemetery, as the smoke of the last salute to a hero hung in the flickering light and drifted upward through the great trees, as the still air was yet quivering with the notes of the bugle-call which is the soldiers requiem, a tall figure, gaunt and bent, stepped out from behind the blue line of the troops.  It was that of Judge Whipple.  He carried in his hand a wreath of white roses—­the first of many to be laid on Richter’s grave.

Poor Richter!  How sad his life had been!  And yet he had not filled it with sadness.  For many a month, and many a year, Stephen could not look upon his empty place without a pang.  He missed the cheery songs and the earnest presence even more than he had thought.  Carl Richter,—­as his father before him,—­had lived for others.  Both had sacrificed their bodies for a cause.  One of them might be pictured as he trudged with Father Jahn from door to door through the Rhine country, or shouldering at sixteen a heavy musket in the Landwehr’s ranks to drive the tyrant Napoleon from the beloved Fatherland Later, aged before his time, his wife dead of misery, decrepit and prison-worn in the service of a thankless country, his hopes lived again in Carl, the swordsman of Jena.  Then came the pitiful Revolution, the sundering of all ties, the elder man left to drag out his few weary days before a shattered altar.  In Carl a new aspiration had sprung up, a new patriotism stirred.  His, too, had been the sacrifice.  Happy in death, for he had helped perpetuate that great Union which should be for all time the refuge of the oppressed.

CHAPTER IV

THE LIST OF SIXTY

One chilling day in November, when an icy rain was falling on the black mud of the streets, Virginia looked out of the window.  Her eye was caught by two horses which were just skeletons with the skin stretched over them.  One had a bad sore on his flank, and was lame.  They were pulling a rattle-trap farm wagon with a buckled wheel.  On the seat a man, pallid and bent and scantily clad, was holding the reins in his feeble hands, while beside him cowered