CHAPTER XIII.
_Henry Schulte becomes the Owner of "Alten Hagen."_-_Surprising Increase in Wealth._--_An Imagined Attack upon His Life._--_The Miser Determines to Sail for America._ It was at this time that the projected railroad between Dortmund and Dusseldorf began to assume definite proportions, and as the line of the contemplated road lay through the village of Hagen, much excitement was engendered in consequence.
The people of Dortmund were building extravagant castles in the air, and wild and vague were the dreams which filled their sanguine minds as they contemplated the advantages that were to accrue to them upon the completion of this enterprise.
The contagion spread rapidly to Hagen, and the simple-minded villagers, who saw in this movement the rapid growth of their little town; the possible increase in the value of their property and the consequent augmenting of their now limited fortunes, hailed with delight the information that energetic operations would soon be begun, with the view of successfully accomplishing the desired object.
Not so, however, thought the Baron von Lindenthal, whose vast estate lay in close proximity to the village, immediately adjoining the farm owned and occupied by Henry Schulte, and through whose domain the road must necessarily pass.
To him the idea of encroaching upon the ancestral acres of a von Lindenthal, was an act of sacrilege not to be complacently submitted to.

The quiet and peaceful seclusion in which he and those who had preceded him had lived, and the repose of his declining years was to be disturbed by the whistling of the locomotive and the rattle of the train.

The din, and bustle and activity of trade was to be brought to his very threshold, and the ease and comfort of his aristocratic retirement would soon become a thing of the past.

This must not and could not be permitted, and the blood of the patrician boiled within his noble veins as he contemplated the outrage that thus threatened him, and which was to result in laying profane hands upon his possessions.

Improvements were all very well in their way, but then they must not be of such a character as to interfere with the pleasure or the luxurious ease of the Baron von Lindenthal.