THE OPPERMANNS gence frorn ours, a sort of American Indian point of view. He was a cunning devil, that's certain." No doubt he had that Nordic craftiness, Berthold rneditated, about which everyone talked nowadays. Dr. Vogelsang had it too. Berthold lay awake during the night, he often did now. He had only the small lamp on his bed-table switched on. The wallpaper had a delicate design, repeated a hundredfold: an exotic bird sitting on a drooping twig. If one half closed one's eyes, the line wh ich forrned the bird's breast, taken with the line of the suspended twig, produced the contour of a face. Ab, now he had it, That was the face of Arminius. A broad fore- head, a Hat nose, a big rnouth, a short but strong chin. Berthold smiled. Now he had got his man. Now he had got the better of Dr. Vogelsang. He went peacefully to sleep, Up to now, Berthold had not confided his difficulties to any- one except Heinrich Lavendel. From then on his taciturnity left hirn. Only in the presence of his parents did he keep silent. They noticed that the boy was excited about something, but they knew from experience that if they asked hirn what it was, he would only get stubborn. So they waited for him to speak of his own free will. But Berthold talked to a good many others, and collected a good rnany opinions. There was, for instance, that experi- enced man of the world, the chauffeur Franzke. For hirn, the battle in the T eutoburg F orest held no problem. "The whole thing is clear," he decided; "in those days there might have been some justification for National Socialism." Jaques La- vendel, on the contrary, declared that the barbarians had made the same mistake at that time that the [ews made seventy years later, that is to say, they had blindly revolted against a brilliantly organized stronger power. "That sort of thing never succeeds," he concluded, putting his head on one side, and drawing his lids far down over his blue eyes. Much more sympathetic to Berthold than this sober inter-