"I admire your courage, but I cannot take advantage of it."
"Not take advantage of it! You have no right to decline it. I am your son as well as Roland; I stand by you, and now it shall be shown who has genuine nobility and bravery. I admire you—but we'll drop this now. Has Roland got back yet?"
"No."
"Then he has gone with the Ensign to the dinner. I will go for him."
Sonnenkamp looked at him in amazement as he drove off; he could not comprehend it. He was now alone again. He mentally accompanied the messengers he had sent round the city, and out to the pleasure-grounds. His thought went out in search of Roland, but did not find him, any more than the messengers did. Roland had gone with the Cabinetsrath's son, as Pranken had conjectured, to the military club-house, where a number of the garrison officers, after the laborious review of the forenoon, had ordered a dinner. There was a great deal of merriment and drinking, and they drank the young American's health. Roland was one of the liveliest among them. There came in a straggling guest, and cried, out in the midst of the uproar,—
"Have you heard? The slave-trader has been caught with a paper lasso."
"What's to pay?" was, called out.
The new-comer read out of the paper:—
"A proposal, with all due deference, for a coat of arms and a device for the ennobled slave-trader and slave-murderer, James Henry Sonnenkamp, alias Banfield, of Louisiana.
"It would give us peculiar satisfaction to run a parallel between the young nobility in the two hemispheres; to live on the labor of others is their motto; 'thou art born to do nothing,' say the young nobility of the Old as well as of the New World. The Americans have also a superstitious belief that there is some peculiar honor in being ennobled. Not because we share in this belief, but rather in order to do something towards removing it, we have written to America for information about a certain Herr Sonnenkamp. We have hitherto been silent, and we should have been silent longer and forever, out of regard for the children of this outcast, for they do not deserve to bear the load of guilt. We are no friends of the nobility: we regard this institution as of the past and as dead; but the nobles are our German fellow-citizens, also, and a part of our nation. As citizens, merely, we have no power to thrust out a man from our community, and we should have felt obliged to let this man alone; but now, we are ready to furnish the evidence that the man who calls himself Sonnenkamp, and lives at Villa Eden, has been one of the most merciless slave-traders and slave-murderers. Then proceed, O German nobles, and ennoble him,—give him a coat-of-arms. The heralds of our editorial office recommend as a device-—-"