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 hand, that now he no longer needed to take it into account and could give full vent to his fury. It is true that after some time he became merciful again, but there were considerable doubts that this was due to humane considerations towards the prisoners.

When Hindenburg became an Austrian Field-Marshal, the Viennese attributed to him an anecdotal desire to become an Austrian Sergeant-Major as well,—if only those worthy narrators had known their Sergeant-Major Papritz as well as the members of other Austrian nationalities knew him in a military prison!

The judicial supervisors emphatically refused to interfere—the internal affairs of the jail were not their concern. They arrested a man, cross-examined him, finally brought him up for trial—whether in the meantime he lived under reasonably humane conditions, and in fact how he lived, had nothing whatever to do with them.

"Tell me, Dušek, who was that infantry-man this morning in the elegant riding-boots?"

"That was Mr. Fiedler. A man who has seen a good deal of the world and of life. A Viennese, a German, who speaks all the Slavonic languages fluently, speaks a great deal and yet says nothing. At least, not about himself. He is a convict—he has another five or six years of his sentence to serve, and nobody here has found out what it is for. Ask him, he will tell you. But ask him tomorrow, he will tell you something quite different. He has been in Asia, in America, his experiences are enormous, he is an expert at a whole series of trades and at all kinds of clerical work, but what kind of a man lurks behind all this it would be difficult to say. He wraps himself up in his speeches as in a mist. He is the superintendent's right hand, so that while the superintendent sits and smokes pipe after pipe, Fiedler does the work. Returns, reports, bills, orders—he prepares them-all. And at the same time he is a kind of minor Papritz