the true tendency of every man's self. Nature regards as nothing more
than the pert play of deluded children imagining themselves to be wise.
But short-sighted man often finds an insuperable irony in the
contradiction between the conviction of his own mind and the mysterious
ordering of this inscrutable Power, who first nourished and fed him at
her maternal bosom and then deserted him; and this irony fills him with
terror and awe, since it threatens to annihilate his own self.

The mother of Life does not choose for her favourites either the
palaces of the great or the state-apartments of princes. And so she
made our Johannes, who, as the kindly reader will soon learn, might be
called one of her most richly endowed favourites, first see the light
of the world on a wretched heap of straw, in the workshop of an
impoverished master turner in Augsburg. His mother died of want and
from suffering soon after the child's birth, and his father followed
her after the lapse of a few months.

The town government had to take charge of the helpless boy; and when
the Council's master carpenter, a well-to-do, respectable man, who
found in the child's face, notwithstanding that it was pinched with
hunger, certain traits which pleased him,--when he would not suffer the
boy to be lodged in a public institution, but took him into his own
house, in order to bring him up along with his own children, then there
dawned upon Johannes his first genial ray of sunshine, heralding a
happier lot in the future.

In an incredibly short space of time the boy's frame developed, so that
it was difficult to believe that the little insignificant creature in
the cradle had really been the shapeless colourless chrysalis out of
which this pretty, living, golden-locked boy had proceeded, like a
beautiful butterfly. But--what seemed of more importance--along with
this pleasing grace of physical form the boy soon displayed such
eminent intellectual faculties as astonished both his foster-father and
his teachers. Johannes grew up in a workshop which sent forth some of
the best and highest work that mechanical skill was able to produce,
since the master carpenter to the Council was constantly engaged upon
the most important buildings. No wonder, therefore, that the child's
mind, which caught up everything with such keen clear perception,
should be excited thereby, and should feel all his heart drawn towards
a trade the deeper significance of which, in so far as