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More than once had the rich uncle, owner of the delicatessen shop in New York, written to urge that his nephew–whose frailty of body made him unfit to enter upon the hard life of a worker in the mines–should come to America; and with his large knowledge of affairs the uncle had explained that the best bill of exchange in which money could be carried from Andreasberg to New York was canary-birds, that could be bought for comparatively little in the German town, and that would be worth in the American city a very great sum. And now on this shrewd advice Andreas acted. The dear old bauernhaus was sold, and its furnishing with it; and all the money thus gained, together with the greater sum that, little by little, his father had added to the store in the old leather bag (saving only what the journey would cost) was spent in buying the finest canary-birds which money could buy; so that for a long while after that time Andreasberg was desolate, for all of its sweetest singers were gone.

Thus it fell out that even in the time of his long journey his birds still sang to him; and his fellow-travellers by land and sea regarded curiously this slim, pale youth, who shyly kept apart from human converse and communed with his companions the birds. And so lovingly well did Andreas care for his little feathered friends that not one died throughout the whole long passage; and as the ship came up the beautiful bay of New York on a sunny May morning, while Andreas stood on the deck with his cages about him, very blithely and sweetly did the birds sing their hopeful song of greeting to the New World.

But it was a false song of hope, after all. Hearts were fickle thirty years ago, even as hearts are fickle to-day; and the first news that Andreas heard when he was come to his uncle’s home (a very fine home, over a very fine shop, indeed) was that Christine had been a twelvemonth married–in very complete forgetfulness of all her fine words about the heart left behind her, and of all her fine promises that she would be true!

That there be such things as broken hearts is an open question. Yet when this news came suddenly to Andreas a keen agony of pain went through his heart as though it were really breaking; and with his hands pressed tightly against his breast, and with a face as pale as death itself, he fell to the floor. He would have died then very willingly; and it was very unwillingly–the fierce pain leaving him as suddenly as it had come–that he returned to life. Whatever may be said for or against the probability of broken hearts, there can be no question as to the verity of broken lives. That day, assuredly, the life of Andreas Stoffel was broken, and it never wholly mended again. For a while even the song of his birds lost all its sweetness, and seemed to him but a discordant sound.

Yet even a broken life, until it be snuffed out entirely, must battle in the world for standing-room. Luckily for Andreas, there was no need for him to question how his own particular battle should be made. The shape in which his little store of worldly wealth was cast obviously determined the lines on which he should seek maintenance. It was plain that by the rearing and the selling of canary-birds he must gain support until the time should come (and he hoped that it would come soon) when he might find release from this earth, where love so soon grows false and cold.

The rich uncle, who was a kind-hearted man, gave his help in the matter of finding a shop wherein the canary-bird business might be advantageously carried on, and gave also the benefit of his commercial wisdom and knowledge of American ways. And so, with no great difficulty, Andreas was soon established in a snug little place of his own on the East Side; where the friendly German speech sounded almost constantly in his ears, and where the friendly German customs obtained almost as completely as in his own dear German home. But, after all, the change was a dismal one. As his unaccustomed nose was assailed by the rank oil-vapors blown across from Hunter’s Point he longed regretfully for the fresh, aromatic air that the south winds swept up and over his old home from the pines of the Schwarz-wald; and the contrast was a sorry one between a home on the slopes of the Harz Mountains and a home in Avenue B.