The town of Worms was his cradle, where the Frau Mutter still sat at her window, an erect old lady of eighty years, gazing out on the Luther monument, across the space of the Luther-Platz. Early sent to Heidelberg, he had sworn fealty to the study of medicine with four comrades. The friends had also made a compact to meet and sup together at the Alten Kaiser of Worms once in five years and pledge the anniversary in a toast of Johannisberg.
Paul Weisener had broken his word, for a phantom had risen before him and beckoned him aside from the chosen path. He had relinquished his studies, abandoned his books and experiments, with the response,—
"I follow."
The phantom was the shade of a lost people, the Etruscans. The vanished race claimed and found in him a willing: slave. The student tracked the ancient Etruscan to the site of his long-obliterated cities, camps, and seaports. He gathered together tenderly the golden leaves of the warrior's diadem, the delicately-wrought jewelry of his women, the toys of his children, placing such relics in museums with the jars of terra-cotta, bronze mirrors, candelabra, and coins. He read the history of the phantom's career on the fresh coloring of the paintings of his tomb, whether nuptial banquet, funeral rite, or the passage of the soul beyond the grave, attended by the spirits of good and evil. Not satisfied with mere archaeological research, the doctor pursued his hero, as the first peddler, of prodigious antiquity, across the Alpine routes, the St. Bernard, the Splügen, and the Mont Cenis, trading in amber of the Baltic with Egypt, and carrying iron, rudely smelted, to Great Britain in exchange for tin. Here was a primitive merchant with a keen eye to business worthy of respect.
The German, staff in hand, sought the imprints of the footsteps of this factor of an early commerce, and the shade, eluding him, retreated once more to the door of the sepulchre, a majestic form, clad in armor, and the flowing toga, borrowed by the later Roman, and mocked at his researches.
"What was I in life?" queried the ghost. "Did I spring from Lydian, Egyptian, or Phœnician stock? What does my language teach you?"
The savant had paused, foiled, even aghast, and mindful of Niebuhr's jesting promise to share his own private fortune with the man who should prove the origin of the Etruscan. Baffled, if you will, but defeated,—never! Discouragement was a word as unknown in his vocabulary as the mood "langeweile" was to his temperament. Spring shed her fragrant blossoms of almond and wild pear on ancient Fidcnæ, summer smote Arezzo, the red city of the potters, on her arid hill-side, autumn rains dripped on the cliffs of Castro, winter gloomed above Perugia's citadel, framed in an amphitheatre of snow-crested Apennines, but the Herr Doctor steadily pursued his aim.
Parlan le tombe ove la storia è muta.
He sought ever the clue to the enigma to which he had devoted many years, aware that in the sepulchre
