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mass of photographs, mostly, it appeared, of German legal documents of some sort. The only other things in the box were a sealed package and a sealed envelope. On the package was written: “Correspondence between Hans Schneider and his wife, with other documents found by Hilton G. Greener and Robert L. Moreton among effects of late Amelia Schneider Johnson, Sept. 1938.” On the envelope was written: “Photograph handed to R. L. M. by Father Weichs at Bad Schwennheim.”
    George put Mr. Moreton’s personal things back in the deed box and took the rest of the contents up to his office. There the first thing he did was to open the sealed parcel.
    The letters in it had been carefully numbered and initialled by Mr. Greener and Mr. Moreton. There were seventy-eight of them, all tied up in small packets with silk ribbon and with a pressed flower in each. George undid one of the packets. The letters in it belonged to the courtship period of Amelia’s parents, Hans Schneider and Mary Smith. They showed that Hans had been working in a warehouse at the time and learning English, and that Mary had been learning German. George thought them formal, graceless, and dull. However, their value to Mr. Moreton must have been considerable, for they had probably made possible the speedy tracing of the Smith family concerned, and led to its elimination from the list of claimants.
    George tied the packet up again and turned to an album of old photographs. In it there were photographs of Amelia and Martin as children, of their brother Frederick, who had died at the age of twelve, and, of course, of Hans and Mary. Moreinteresting, because it was even older, was a daguerreotype portrait of an old man with a vast beard.
    He sat erect and very stern, his big hands grasping the arms of the photographer’s chair, his head pressed hard against the back of it. The lips were full and determined. There was a heavy, strong face beneath the beard. The silvered copper plate on which the portrait had been made was glued to a red velvet mount. Beneath it Hans had written:
“Mein geliebt Vater, Franz Schneider. 1782–1850.”
    The only other document was a thin, leather-bound notebook filled with Hans’s spidery writing. It was written in English. On the first page, elaborately decorated with ornamental pen-strokes, was a description of the book’s contents: “An Account of My Beloved Father’s Heroic Part in the Battle of Preussisch-Eylau, fought in the year 1807, of His Wounding, and of His Meeting with My Beloved Mother, who Saved His Life. Set down by Hans Schneider for His Children in June 1867, that They may be Proud of the Name They Bear.”
    The Account began with the events leading up to Eylau and went on with descriptions of the various actions in which the Ansbach Dragoons had engaged the enemy, and of spectacular incidents in the battle: a Russian cavalry charge, the capture of a battery of guns, the decapitation of a French officer. Obviously, what Hans had written down was a legend learned at his father’s knee. Parts of it still had the artless quality of a fairy tale; but as the account progressed, the middle-aged Hans could be seen perplexedly trying to reconcile his boyhood memories with his adult sense of reality. The writing of the Account, George thought, must have been a strange experience for him.
    After his description of the battle, however, Hans’s touch had become surer. The emotions of the wounded hero, his certainty that God was with him, his determination to do his duty until the end—these things were described with practisedunction. And when the terrible moment of treachery came, when the cowardly Prussians had abandoned the wounded hero while he was helping a stricken comrade, Hans had let loose a torrent of Biblical denunciation. If God had not guided the hoofs of the hero’s horse to the farmhouse of the gentle Maria Dutka, all would certainly have been over. As it was, Maria had been understandably suspicious of the