uppose you
would like to know why our village is called Keilhau?"

While speaking, he pointed up the stream and briefly described its
course.

We assented.

We had passed the village of Schaale. The one before us, with the church,
was called Eichfeld, and at our right was another which we could not see,
Lichtstadt. In ancient times, he told us, the mountain sides and the
bottom of the whole valley had been clothed with dense oak forests. Then
people came who wanted to till the ground. They began to clear (lichten)
these woods at Lichtstadt. This was a difficult task, and they had used
axes (Keile) for the purpose. At Eichfeld they felled the oaks (Fiche),
and carried the trunks to Schaale, where the bark (Schale) was stripped
off to make tan for the tanners on the Saale. So the name of Lichtstadt
came from the clearing of the forests, Eichfeld from the felling of the
oaks, Schaale from stripping off the bark, and Keilhau from the hewing
with axes.

This simple tale of ancient times had sprung from the Thuringian soil, so
rich in legends, and, little as it might satisfy the etymologist, it
delighted me. I believed it, and when afterward I looked down from a
height into the valley and saw the Saale, my imagination clothed the bare
or pineclad mountain slopes with huge oak forests, and beheld the giant
forms of the ancient Thuringians felling the trees with their heavy axes.

The idea of violence which seemed to be connected with the name of
Keilhau had suddenly disappeared. It had gained meaning to me, and Herr
Middendorf had given us an excellent proof of a fundamental requirement
of Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the institution: "The external must
be spiritualized and given an inner significance."

The same talented pedagogue had said, "Our education associates
instruction with the external world which surrounds the human being as
child and youth"; and Middendorf carried out this precept when, at the
first meeting, he questioned us about the trees and bushes by the
wayside, and when we were obliged to confess our ignorance of most of
them, he mentioned their names and described their peculiarities.

At last we reached the Keilhau plain, a bowl whose walls formed tolerably
high mountains which surrounded it on all sides except toward Rudolstadt,
where an opening permitted the Schaalbach to wind through meadows and
fields. So the village lies like an egg in a nest open in one direction,
like the beetle in the