Page:Famous stories from foreign countries.djvu/15

 And my great, great, grandfather, Primus Thaller, sang the kuhreihen in the midst of the streets of Paris! He stood in the courtyard of the Swiss barracks, where the sand is yellow and glowed in the light of the setting sun, and where the soldiers were getting ready to go into the city. This was the way it happened. He had just received a letter from America, from his brother Quintus, who was six years younger, and had been a drummer boy in the regiment of the Prince of Orleans. It was the typical letter of an eighteen year old boy who wrote enthusiastically of Lafayette, Washington, Freedom, and the rights of the individual. Young Quintus said that the Regiment of the Lilies would return to France; over their heads were invisible, prophetic tongues of fire, which, in France, would burst out into a great conflagration, great words; Freedom! Equality! Fraternity!

Great words? Freedom, equality? Then my poor, lonesome great grandfather thought how all this had existed in his own home country for hundreds of years—in Appenzell, from which village he had come with the hope of winning fame and gold. And he thought how they were bringing these ideas from America, across the sea, to proclaim them new and world astonishing, while in his own little home village, they flourished quietly. The great laws of the human race are cause neither for a great intoxication nor a great jubilation. They represent merely a careful estimating; for the great mass of humanity they are meat, bread, shelter, hearth, a little sunshine, and green