"Hurrah! victory!" shouted Claus, "you're hungry. The battle's won! Now let the water run down the Rhine, there's another day to-morrow."
Eric had had a presentiment that Roland would be at the field-guard's; he went after him, and was rejoiced to find him calm once more. They went home together, and Roland said:—
"Over there at the Huntsman's it came into my head all at once: What would Benjamin Franklin say to me now? Do you know, Eric, what he would say?"
"Not entirely, but I think he would say that a man who does nothing but grieve stands on a level with the brute, which in a mishap cannot help itself. The power of man has its beginning in this, that he can grasp, comprehend, and direct his misfortune in such a way as to make something out of it for his own good. If you suffer yourself to fall asleep in affliction, you are responsible for your own injury. Rouse yourself. As long as there is anything which you can esteem in yourself, you have aright to the esteem of others."
"Thanks," exclaimed Roland. "For my part, I have been thinking what Benjamin Franklin would say. I saw him before me with his genial countenance, his long snow-white hair, and he said:—Mark you, the worst thing is not what shames us in the eyes of the world, but to allow the shame so to pervert your mind that you look upon all men as base."
What he had listened to on the way he had shaped into a strong pillar of thought for himself.
Eric could not tell how it gladdened his heart to feel that he had fashioned this youth for such things; he wanted to cry out to him, You are a man; but he repressed it. It would not do to say it aloud. With a tranquillity wrung from the most profound grief, they both returned to the villa.
They reached the garden wall, from the face of which the porter was scraping something.
"There it is! there it is!" exclaimed Roland. "I have read it!"
The porter was scraping the mortar with a sharp iron, and this scraping went through Roland's soul as if the work were done on his own heart. All the coolness and composure that he had gained disappeared.