He seemed never to have been young or child-like. His face was tough, sallow and colorless: the skin looked as thick and rough as a man’s and it was covered unpleasantly with thick white hair which was not visible until one came close to him. His eyes were small, red, and watery looking and thickly lashed and browed with the same silken, unpleasantly white, hair. His features were small, blunted, and brutal: the nose small and turned up and flattened at the tip, so that the nostrils had a wide flaring appearance, the mouth was coarse, blurred and indefinite, and the cheekbones also had a blunted flattened-out appearance.

Hartmann’s head was shaved, a bluish stubble of hair covered it evenly, and the structure of the skull was ugly, mean, and somehow repellent: it seemed to slant forward and downward from the bony cage at the back of the brain to a pinched and painful brow. Finally Hartmann’s body was meagre and stringy looking, but immensely tough, his hands were disproportionately large and raw, and dangled crudely and clumsily at his sides. Brutal in mind and body, neither his person nor his character was pleasing, and Frederick hated him. And this hatred Hartmann returned on him with cordial measure.

“Jack!”

Frederick did not hear that word of harsh command. His dark eye brooded into vacancy, his mind was fixed and lost in stellar distances, his spirit was soaring far away across the surging blue, the immense and shiny wink of an ocean that washed the shores of all the earth. And a channel of bright water led him straight to the goal of all his dreaming. Upon the decks of clean white river-steamers he went down the river Rhine. He went from Koblenz on to Bonn, from Bonn, to Köln, from Köln to Düsseldorf, and then through Holland to the sea. And then he put out to sea upon another mightier ship. The sea was blue and shining, but there was also gold upon it: it was never grey. The great ship foamed and lifted with a lordly prancing motion, like a horse, he felt the rock and swell, the infinite plangent undulance of the sea beneath that foaming keel, and the great ship rushed onward day by day into the west.

And now, after many days, Frederick saw before him the outposts of the land. He smelled the brave familiar fragrance of the land, the spermy sea-wrack and the warmth of earth, and he saw before him first pale streaks of sand, a low coast, and then faint pallid greens, and little towns and houses. Now, the ship entered the narrow gateways of the harbor, and now Frederick saw before him a great harbor busy with the play and traffic of a thousand boats. And he saw before him, at the harbor’s base, a fabulous city, built upon an island. It swept upward from an opalescent cloud, from which it seemed to grow, on which it was upborne lightly, and as magical as a vision, and yet it was real and shining, and as solid as the rock on which it had been founded. And by the city flowed a river—“ein Fluss viel schoner als den Rhein”—a thing almost incredible, and yet it must be so, for Uncle Max had seen it, and sworn just the night before that it was true. Beyond the city was an immense, fertile, and enchanted land—“ein Land von unbegrenzte möglich keiten,” Uncle Max had sworn, and surely Uncle Max had known, for he had come back from that country speaking its strange nasal accents, wearing its strange garments, rich with the tribute of its enormous bounty. And he had said that some day he would come and take Frederick back with him, and Frederick, dreaming of the wealth, the gold, the glory and the magic of that far shining city that floated upward from its cloud of mist hoped for this more than for anything on earth.

“Jack! Jack! 1st Friedrich Jack hier?”

He came to with a sharp start of confusion as that harsh and choleric voice broke in upon his revery, and the class whose attention had been riveted for some seconds on his dreaming face burst into a sharp and sudden yelp of glee as he scrambled frantically to his feet, straightened his shoulders, and stammered out confusedly,

“Hier, bitte. Ja. Ich bin hier.”

That high and hateful face, hairless, skull-like, seamed and parchment dry, scarred hideously upon one sallow cheek, with its livid scorpion of saber wounds, and with thin convulsive lips drawn back above a row of big yellow teeth, now peered at him above its glasses with a stare of wall-eyed fury. In a moment the stringy tendons of the neck craned hideously above the choker collar, and the harsh voice rasped with fury as old Kugel’s ramrod form bowed with a slightly ironic courtesy in its frock coat sheathing of funereal black.

“Wenn sie sind fertig, Excellenz,” he said.

“Ja—Ja—fertig,” Frederick stammered foolishly and incoherently, wondering desperately what the question was, and if it had already been asked. The class tittered with expectancy, and already unnerved by his shock and confusion, Frederick blurted out with no sense at all of what he was saying: “Ich meine—Ich bin fertig—Onkel!”

A sickening wave of shame and mortification swept over him the moment that he spoke the words, and as the instant roar of the class brought to him the knowledge of his hideous blunder. Onkel! Would he ever hear the end of this? And how could he have been such a fool as to identify, even in a moment of forgetfulness, this cruel and ugly old ape with the princely and heroic figure of his Uncle Max. Tears of shame welled in his eyes, he stammered out incoherent apologies and explanations that went unheard in the furious uproar of the class, but he could have bitten his tongue out for rage and mortification.

As for Kugel, he stood stock still, his eyes staring with horror, like a man who has just received a paralytic stroke. In a moment, recovering his powers of speech, and torn with fury between the roaring class and the culprit who stood trembling before him, he snatched up a heavy book, lifted it high above his head in two dry, freckled hands, and smashed it down upon the table with terrific force.

“Schweig!” he yelled. “Schweigen sie!” a command that was no longer necessary, since all of them had subsided instantly into a stunned cowed silence.

He tried to speak but could not find the words he wanted. In a moment, pointing a parched trembling finger at Frederick, he said in a small choked whisper of a voice:

“Das wort—das wort—für Bauer.” He craned convulsively above his collar as if he was strangling.

Frederick gulped, opened his mouth and gaped wordlessly.

“Was?” screamed Kugel taking a step toward him.

“Ag-ag-ag!” he stuttered like a miserable idiot.

“Was!”

He had known the word a moment before—he knew it still, he tried frantically to recall it, but now, his fright, shame, and confusion were so great that he could not have pronounced it if he had had it written out before him on a piece of paper.

Desperately he tried again.

“Ag-ag-ag,” but at the titter of laughter that began to run across the class again, he subsided helplessly, completely disorganized and unable to continue.

Kugel stared at him a moment over the rims of his thick glasses, his yellow bulging eyeballs fixed in an expression of hatred and contempt.

“Ag-ag-ag!” he sneered, with hateful mimicry.