The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-10-30


 up they are all alike. It is strange what interesting studies one can make of boys like those."
 The colonel looked ruefully at his empty glass and the cooper seemed to suddenly wake up. will the colonel have another glass7" "Hm-some other kinda kind that you cannot buy by the glass, though--that is the one want But a whole bottle Is rather too much for myself" He looked about the room and, for the first time, seemed to notice the lawyer. The lawyer saw the mute question in the old soldiers eye and replied to it with: If the colonel will allow me I should be delighted to empty bottle with him." The colonel bowed end pointing to name on the wine list, said with the air and in the tone of a field marshall Fetch me a bottle of that" Then, turning to the lawyer. 'It is a brand, sir, well known to mean excellent brandt Is called Noble Blood" The old colonel turned and gazed dreamily out of the window, looking up to the sky, in which was re-
 1ected the red light of the sunset. It seemed as if he saw visions of that lost time when he had been a boy and thought of those who were young with him-lost form and faces, lost hopes and feelings scattered through the dim vista of the years and now dimly seen in the fading light of the dying day
 The bottle of Noble Blood which the cooper placed before the colonel and the lawyer was a delicious Bordeaux, brown and oily with age-the bees wing" f1oated on the glass when it was poured out. The lawyer broke the col onels reverie with a remark on the wine. q agree with you, sir, 1t is in deed Noble Blood" said he as he slipped from his glass The gaze of the old man strange" said he, "how, as one grows older, he reverts so much more to the past-thinks so much more of his earl fer days than he does of those few which are yet permitted to him to en- joy" The lawyer held his peace, for he realized that when men recall the past they become poets, and poets should not be questioned or interrupted at their work. There was a long pause, and then the colonel said Tn this life how many different sorts of people one gets to know. There are some that live on and on; and yet it would have been much better if they had never lived at all. And others leave us how much too soon! There lies a great deal under that" He spread out his palm and passed 1t over the table as if it meant | to him the surface of the earth and he was referring to those who slept in bring before me-every time see | them-a recollection of my own ex- perience-something which I saw" | The waiter had withdrawn to a further corner of the room, and the only sound was the voice of the colonel, with it's many pauses, coming like fitful gusts as the winds of memory stirred
 the past. And this was the story he
 told: In Berlin, behind the new Fried
 richstrasse, there stands huge build | ing which was the old cadet school be . | fore the new one was built out at Lich-
 terfelde. The large outer court is now
 overgrown with weeds and deserted
 But 1t was not so in the colonels time, | for all the drills and exercises of the
 cadets took place there, and the ca
 dets used 1t as a playground in the
 recreation hours. Beyond this outer
 court lies another court, called the Square Court, also a recreation ground,
 and surrounded by the principal build. ings of the school. There was, still
 further on, third and smaller court
 where stood the hospital From this
 hospital small door opened into the
 yard of the gymnasium, and this door
 was always kept closed except upon
 certain occasions. Those were sad ones
 and terrible to the cadets, for behind
 that door was the mortuary room, and
 when a cadet died his body was haid there while his fellow students marched
 past to take last look at their dead comrade.
 The cadets were divided into two l.classes, the first and the second, and there was also the ''select,'' a body of young men who entered the army as of-