UNDERS OF THE KEILHAU INSTITUTE, AND A GLIMPSE AT THE HISTORY OF
THE SCHOOL.

I was well acquainted with the three founders of our institute--Fredrich
Froebel, Middendorf, and Langethal--and the two latter were my teachers.
Froebel was decidedly "the master who planned it."

When we came to Keilhau he was already sixty-six years old, a man of
lofty stature, with a face which seemed to be carved with a dull knife
out of brown wood.

His long nose, strong chin, and large ears, behind which the long locks,
parted in the middle, were smoothly brushed, would have rendered him
positively ugly, had not his "Come, let us live for our children," beamed
so invitingly in his clear eyes. People did not think whether he was
handsome or not; his features bore the impress of his intellectual power
so distinctly that the first glance revealed the presence of a remarkable
man.

Yet I must confess--and his portrait agrees with my memory--that his face
by no means suggested the idealist and man of feeling; it seemed rather
expressive of shrewdness, and to have been lined and worn by severe
conflicts concerning the most diverse interests. But his voice and his
glance were unusually winning, and his power over the heart of the child
was limitless. A few words were sufficient to win completely the shyest
boy whom he desired to attract; and thus it happened that, even when he
had been with us only a few weeks, he was never seen crossing the
court-yard without a group of the younger pupils hanging to his coattails
and clasping his hands and arms.

Usually they were persuading him to tell stories, and when he
condescended to do so, older ones flocked around him too, and they were
never disappointed. What fire, what animation the old man had retained!
We never called him anything but "Oheim." The word "Onkel" he detested as
foreign, because it was derived from "avunculus" and "oncle." With the
high appreciation he had of "Tante"--whom he termed, next to the mother,
the most important factor of education in the family--our "Oheim" was
probably specially agreeable to him.

He was thoroughly a self-made man. The son of a pastor in Oberweissbach,
in Thuringia, he had had a dreary childhood; for his mother died young,
and he soon had a step-mother, who treated him with the utmost tenderness
until her own children were born. Then an indescribably sad time began
for the neglected boy, whose dreamy temperament vexed even his own
father. Yet in th