trails of snow in the hollows, and with low, rapid clouds hiding the peaks. He trembled with joy. Then having gazed at the lowest mountain slopes, at the vineyards, and then the meadows, as if to impress on his memory all the details of these places found again after a long absence, and above all with the added satisfaction of remaining among them, his eyes fastened on the red roofs of the saw-mill, which made a barrier at the end of the Oberlé property, on the chimneys, on the high building where the turbines were, to the right on the course of the mountain stream of Alsheim, and nearer on the timber-yard whence the factory got its supplies, on the heaps of wood from trees of all sorts—beams, planks, which rose in pyramids and enormous cubes, beyond the winding alleys and the clumps of trees, some two hundred yards from the house. Jets of white steam in many places escaped from the roof of the saw-mill, and rested on the north wind like the clouds up above.

The young man went to the left, crossed the park, formerly planted and designed by M. Philippe Oberlé, and which was now beginning to be a freer and more harmonious corner of nature, and turning towards the piles of oak trunks, elms, and pines, went to knock at the door of the long building.

He entered the glass pavilion which served the master for a workroom. He was engaged in reading the day's letters. Seeing his son appear, he put the papers on the table, made a sign with his hand which meant "I expected your visit—sit down"—and moving his arm-chair, he said:

"Well, my boy! What have you to say to me?"

M. Joseph Oberlé was a ruddy man, quick and authoritative. Because of his shaven lips, his short whiskers, the correctness of his clothes, the easiness of his words and manners, he had sometimes been taken for an old French magistrate. The mistake did not arise with those who thought thus. It had been made by circumstances which had taken M. Joseph Oberlé in spite of himself from the way wherein he had intended to go, and which should have led him to some public office in the magistrature or the administration. The father, the founder of the dynasty, Philippe Oberlé, son of a race of peasant proprietors, had founded at Alsheim in 1850 this mechanical saw-mill, which had rapidly prospered. He had become in a few years rich and powerful, very much beloved, because he neglected no means to that end; increasingly influential, but without at all foreseeing the events which would one day induce him to put his influence at the service of Alsace.

The son of this industrial workman could hardly escape the ambition of being a public functionary. That is what happened—his education had prepared him for it. Taken early from Alsace, pupil for eight years at the Lycée Louis le Grand, then law student, he was at twenty-two years old attached to the office of the Prefect of Charente, when the war broke out. Retained for some months by his chief, who thought it would please his friend the great manufacturer of Alsace if he sheltered the young man behind the walls of the prefecture of Angoulême; then on his demand incorporated tardily in the Army of the Loire, Joseph Oberlé marched much, retired much, suffered much from cold, and fought well on rare occasions. When the war was finished he had to make his choice.

If he had consulted his personal preferences only, he would have remained French, and he would have continued to follow an administrative career, having a taste for authority and few personal opinions on the quality of an order to be transmitted. But his father recalled him to Alsace. He implored him not to leave the work begun and prospering. He said: "My industry is become German by conquest; I cannot leave the instrument of my fortune and your future to perish. I detest the Prussians, but I take the only means which I have of continuing my life usefully. I was a Frenchman, I become an Alsatian. Do the same. I hope it will not be for long."

Joseph Oberlé had obeyed with real repugnance—repugnance at submitting to the law of the conqueror, repugnance at living in the village of Alsheim, lost at the foot of the Vosges. He had even committed at this time imprudences of speech and attitude which he regretted now. For the conquest had lasted; the fortunes of Germany were strengthened, and the young man, associated with his father and become the master of a factory, had felt the meshes of an administration similar to the French administration, but more harassing, stricter, and better obeyed, knotting itself and drawing closer round him. He saw that on every occasion, without any exception, the German authorities would put him in the wrong; the police, the magistrates, the functionaries established for public services which he used daily, the commission of public roads, the railways, the water supply, the forests, the customs. The malevolence which he met with on all sides and in all departments of German administration, although he had become a German subject, was aggravated and had become quite a danger to the prosperity of the house of Alsheim, when, in 1874, M. Philippe Oberlé, giving to his son the direction of the saw-mill, had yielded to the insistences of that poor forsaken country, which wanted to make of him, and did make him, the representative of her interests at the Reichstag, and one of the protesting deputies of Alsace.

This experience, the weariness of waiting, the removal of M. Philippe Oberlé, who spent a part of the year at Berlin, modified sensibly the attitude of the young head of the industrial enterprise. His first fervour, and that of others, grew less. He saw the anti-German manifestations of Alsatian peasants becoming rarer and more prudent. He hardly did any business with France; he no longer received visits from French people, even those made from interested and commercial motives. France, so near by distance, became like a walled-in country, shut up, and whence nothing more came to Alsace, neither travellers nor merchandise. The newspapers he received left him in no doubt as to the slow abandonment which certain French politicians counselled under the name of wisdom and concentration.

In ten years M. Joseph Oberlé had used up, till he could no longer find a trace in himself, all that his temperament allowed him of resistance to oppose to an established power. He was rallied. His marriage with Monica Biehler, desired and arranged by the old and ardent patriot who voted in the Reichstag against Prince Bismarck, had had no influence on his new ideas and attitude, at first secret, soon suspected, then known, then affirmed, then scandalously published by M. Joseph Oberlé. He gave pledges to the Germans, then hostages. He overstepped the boundary. He went farther than obedience. The foremen of the factory, old soldiers of France, admirers of M. Philippe Oberlé, companions of his struggle against the Germanisation of Alsace, bore with difficulty the attitude of the new master and blamed him. One of them in a moment of impatience had said to him one day, "Do you think we are so particularly proud to work for a renegade like you?" He had been discharged. His comrades immediately had taken his part, interceded, talked, and threatened a strike. "Well, do it," the master had said; "I shall be delighted. You are all quarrelsome fellows; I shall replace you by Germans!" They did not believe in the threat, but when a fresh crisis arose M. Joseph Oberlé carried it into execution a little later, that he might not be accused of weakness, which he feared more than injustice, and because he thought he could gain some advantage by replacing the Alsatians, continual grumblers, by workmen from Baden and Wurtemburg who were better disciplined and more easily managed. A third of the employés at the saw-mill had