massed choirs of the "Wreath of Harmony," a speech in which everything he had noted down about Kniippelsdorf was dragged in, and which produced the delightful impression everywhere that he had busied himself all his life with nothing so much as the historical vicissitudes of that hub of civilization.
In the first place, Knüppelsdorf was a city, and Klaus Heinrich alluded to that three times, to the pride of the inhabitants. He went on to say that the city of Knüppelsdorf, as her historical past witnessed, had been connected by bonds of loyalty to the House of Grimmburg for several centuries. As long ago as the fourteenth century, he said, Landgrave Heinrich XV, the Rutensteiner, had signalled out Knüppelsdorf for special favour. He, the Rutensteiner, had lived in the Schloss built on the neighbouring Rutensteine, whose girdle of proud towers and strong walls had sent its greeting to the country for miles round.
Then he reminded his hearers how through inheritance and marriage Kniippelsdorf had at last come into the branch of the family to which his brother and he himself belonged. Heavy storms had in the course of years burst over Knüppelsdorf. Years of war, conflagration, and pestilence had visited it, yet it had always risen again and had always remained loyal to the house of its hereditary princes. And this characteristic the Knüppelsdorf of to-day proved that it possessed by raising a memorial to his, Klaus Heinrich's, beloved father, and it would be with unusual pleasure that he would report to his gracious brother the dazzling and hearty reception which he, as his representative, had here experienced.… The veil fell, the massed choirs of the "Wreath of Harmony" again did their best. And Klaus Heinrich stood smiling, under his theatrical tent, with a feeling of having exhausted his store of knowledge, happy in the certainty that nobody dare
