that we are worthy of the supreme gift which He has given us, and
capable of upholding it with strength and firmness.

"The danger of the country has never been so great as it is now, that
is why, among the youth of Germany, the strong should support the
wavering, that all may rise together.  Our brave brothers in the
north are already assembling from all parts under their banners; the
State of Wurtemburg is, proclaiming a general levy, and volunteers
are coming in from every quarter, asking to die for their country.
I consider it my duty, too, to fight for my country and for all the
dear ones whom I love.  If I were not profoundly convinced of this
truth, I should not communicate my resolution to you,; but my family
is one that has a really German heart, and that would consider me as
a coward and an unworthy son if I did not follow this impulse.  I
certainly feel the greatness of the sacrifice; it costs me something,
believe me, to leave my beautiful studies and go to put myself under
the orders of vulgar, uneducated people, but this only increases my
courage in going to secure the liberty of my brothers; moreover, when
once that liberty is secured, if God deigns to allow, I will return
to carry them His word.

"I take leave, therefore, for a time of you, my most worthy parents,
of my brothers, my sisters, and all who are dear to me.  As, after
mature deliberation, it seems the most suitable thing for me to serve
with the Bavarians.  I shall get myself enrolled, for as long as the
war may last, with a company of that nation.  Farewell, then; live
happily; far away from you as I shall be, I shall follow your pious
exhortations.  In this new track I shall still I hope, remain pure
before God, and I shall always try to walk in the path that rises
above the things of earth and leads to those of heaven, and perhaps
in this career the bliss of saving some souls from their fall may be
reserved for me.

"Your dear image will always be about me; I will always have the Lord
before my eyes and in my heart, so that I may endure joyfully the
pains and fatigues of this holy war.  Include me in your Prayers; God
will send you the hope of better times to help you in bearing the
unhappy time in which we now are.  We cannot see one another again
soon, unless we conquer; and if we should be conquered (which God
forbid!), then my last wish, which I pray you, I conjure you, to
fulfil, my last and supreme wish would be that you, my dear and
deserving German relatives, should leave an enslaved country for some
other not yet under the yoke.

"But why should we thus sadden one another's hearts?  Is not our
cause just and holy, and is not God just and holy?  How then should
we not be victors?  You see that sometimes I doubt, so, in your
letters, which I am impatiently expecting, have pity on me and do not
alarm my soul, far in any case we shall meet again in another
country, and that one will always be free and happy.

"I am, until death, your dutiful and grateful son,

"KARL SAND."


These two lines of Korner's were written as a postscript:--

    "Perchance above our foeman lying dead
     We may behold the star of liberty."

With this farewell to his parents, and with Korner's poems on his
lips, Sand gave up his books, and on the l0th of May we find him in
arms among the volunteer chasseurs enrolled under the command of
Major Falkenhausen, who was at that time at Mannheim; here he found
his second brother, who had preceded him, and they underwent all
their drill together.

Though Sand was not accustomed to great bodily fatigues, he endured
those of the campaign with surprising strength, refusing all the
alleviations that his superiors tried to offer him; for he would
allow no one to outdo him in the trouble that he took for the good of
the country.  On the march he invariably shared: anything that he
possessed fraternally with his comrades, helping those who were
weaker than himself to carry their burdens, and, at once priest and
soldier, sustaining them by his words when he was powerless to do
anything more.

On the 18th of June, at eight o'clock in the evening, he arrived upon
the field of battle at Waterloo, On the 14th of July he entered
Paris.

On the 18th of December, 1815, Karl Sand and his brother were back at
Wonsiedel, to the great joy of their family.  He spent the Christmas
holidays and the end of the year with them, but his ardour for his
new vacation did not allow him to remain longer, and an the 7th of
January he reached Erlangen.  Then, to make up for lost time, he
resolved to subject his day to fixed and uniform rules, and to write
down every evening what he had done since the morning.  It is by the
help of this journal that we are able to follow the young enthusiast,
not only in all the actions of his life, but also in all the thoughts
of his mind and all the hesitations of his conscience.  In it we find
his whole self, simple to naivete, enthusiastic to madness, gentle
even to weakness towards others, severe even to asceticism towards
himself.  One of his great griefs was the expense that his education
occasioned to his parents, and every useless and costly pleasure left
a remorse in his heart.  Thus, on the 9th of February 1816, he
wrote:--

"I meant to go and visit my parents.  Accordingly I went to the
'Commers-haus', and there I was much amused.  N. and T. began upon me
with the everlasting jokes about Wonsiedel; that went on until eleven
o'clock.  But afterwards N. and T. began to torment me to go to the
wine-shop; I refused as long as I could.  But as, at last, they
seemed to think that it was from contempt of them that I would not go
and drink a glass of Rhine wine with them, I did not dare resist
longer.  Unfortunately, they did not stop at Braunberger; and while
my glass was still half full, N. ordered a bottle of champagne.  When
the first had disappeared, T. ordered a second; then, even before
this second battle was drunk, both of them ordered a third in my name
and in spite of me.  I returned home quite giddy, and threw myself on
the sofa, where I slept for about an hour, and only went to bed
afterwards.

"Thus passed this shameful day, in which I have not thought enough of
my kind and worthy parents, who are leading a poor and hard life, and
in which I suffered myself to be led away by the example of people
who have money into spending four florins--an expenditure which was
useless, and which would have kept the whole family for two days.
Pardon me, my God, pardon me, I beseech Thee, and receive the vow
that I make never to fall into the same fault again.  In future I
will live even more abstemiously than I usually do, so as to repair
the fatal traces in my poor cash-box of my extravagance, and not to
be obliged to ask money of my mother before the day when she thinks
of sending me some herself."


Then, at the very time when the poor young man reproaches himself as
if with a crime with having spent four florins, one of his cousins, a
widow, dies and leaves three orphan children.  He runs immediately to
carry the first consolations to the unhappy little creatures,
entreats his mother to take charge of the youngest, and overjoyed at
her answer, thanks her thus:--

"Far the very keen joy that you have given me by your letter, and for
the very dear tone in which your soul speaks to me, bless you, O my
mother!  As I might have hoped and been sure, you have taken little
Julius, and that fills me afresh with the deepest gratitude towards
you, the rather that, in my constant trust in your goodness, I had
already in her lifetime given our good little cousin the promise that
you are fulfilling for me after her death."

About March, Sand, though he did not fall ill, had an indisposition
that obliged him to go and take the waters; his mother happened at
the time to be at the ironworks of Redwitz, same twelve or fifteen
miles from Wonsiedel, where the mineral springs are found.  Sand
established himself there with his mother, and notwithstanding his
desire to avoid interrupting his work, the time taken up by baths, by
invitations to dinners, and even by the walks which his health
required, disturbed the regularity of his usual existence and
awakened his remorse.  Thus we find these lines written in his
journal for April 13th:

"Life, without some high aim towards which all thoughts and actions
tend, is an empty desert: my day yesterday is a proof of this; I
spent it with my own people, and that, of course, was a great
pleasure to me; but how did I spend it?  In continual eating, so that
when I wanted to work I could do nothing worth doing.  Full of
indolence and slackness, I dragged myself into the company of two or
three sets of people, and came from them in the same state of mind as
I went to them."

Far these expeditions Sand made use of a little chestnut horse which
belonged to his brother, and of which he was very fond.  This little
horse had been bought with great difficulty; for, as we have said,
the whole family was poor.  The following note, in relation to the
animal, will give an idea of Sand's simplicity of heart:--

"19th April
"To-day I have been very happy at the ironworks, and very industrious
beside my kind mother.  In the evening I came home on the little
chestnut.  Since the day before yesterday, when he got a strain and
hurt his foot, he has been very restive and very touchy, and when he
got home he refused his food.  I thought at first that he did not
fancy his fodder, and gave him some pieces of sugar and sticks of
cinnamon, which he likes very much; he tasted them, but would not eat
them.  The poor little beast seems to have same other internal
indisposition besides his injured foot.  If by ill luck he were to
become foundered or ill, everybody, even my parents, would throw the
blame on me, and yet I have been very careful and considerate of him.
My God, my Lord, Thou who canst do things both great and small,
remove from me this misfortune, and let him recover as quickly as
possible.  If, however, Thou host willed otherwise, and if this fresh
trouble is to fall upon us, I will try to bear it with courage, and

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