Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/550

172 American champion at golf, breaking all American records."

The House came down from the sublime with a bump. A pompous gentleman of the Opposition who began a sarcastic speech about the American conception of a joke was laughed off his feet, as wave after wave of merriment rolled heavily over the surface of the House. There were cheers for Lord Rawlins, cheers for the golf championship, cheers for Her Majesty, cheers galore; and thus ended, as far as Parliament was concerned, the incident of the British Ambassador.

When Jerry Andrews reported for duty that afternoon, the crowd was jostling yet around "The Orbit's" bulletin boards. That enterprising sheet was still throwing off extra after extra to exploit its journalistic feat, treating the whole affair with the cheerful cynicism which "The Orbit" prided itself upon maintaining in every exigency. Its editor leaned on his elbows blandly as Jerry walked up to his desk.

"You found some news over there, I judge," he remarked.

"Or made some," replied Andrews demurely, catching his eye.

"Humph!" said the editor with Delphic ambiguity; but for the first time in the traditions of the paper, he offered the reporter a cigar. That cigar is hanging over Mr. Andrews's desk, in the "Orbit" office, at this moment.

BATTLE hymn indeed is this famous hymn which Heinrich Heine rightly describes as "the Marseillaise Hymn of the Reformation." Luther composed it for the Diet of Spires, when, on April 20th, 1529, the German Princes made their formal protest against the revocation of their liberties, and so became known as Protestants. In the life-and-death struggle that followed, it was as a clarion summoning all faithful souls to do battle, without fear, against the insulting foe. Luther sang it to the lute every day. It was the spiritual and national tonic of Germany, administered in those dolorous times as doctors administer quinine to sojourners in fever-haunted marshes. Everyone sang it, old and young, children in the street, soldiers on the battle-field. The more heavily hit they were, the more tenaciously did they cherish the song that assured them of ultimate victory. When Melancthon and his friends, after Luther's death, were sent into banishment, they were marvelously cheered as they entered Weimar on hearing a girl sing Luther's hymn in the street. "Sing on, dear daughter mine," said Melancthon, "thou knowest not what comfort thou bringest to our heart." Nearly a hundred years later, before the great victory which he gained over the Catholic forces at Leipsic, Gustavus Adolphus asked his warriors to sing Luther's hymn, and after the victory he thanked God that He had made good the promise, "The field He will maintain it." It was sung at the battle of Lützen. It was sung also many a time and oft during the Franco-German war. In fact, whenever the depths of the German heart are really stirred, the sonorous strains of Luther's hymn instinctively burst forth. M. Vicomte de Voguë, one of the most brilliant of contemporary writers, in his criticism of M. Zola's "Debacle," pays a splendid tribute to the element in the German character which finds its most articulate expression in Luther's noble psalm

"He who is so well up in all the points of the battlefield of Sedan must surely know what was to be seen and heard there on the evening of September 1st, 1870. It was a picture to tempt his pen—those innumerable lines of fires starring all the valley of the Meuse, those grave and solemn chants sent out into the night by hundreds of thousands of voices. No orgy, no disorder, no relaxation of discipline; the men mounting guard under arms till the inexorable task was done; the hymns to the God of victory and the distant