us very imposing, such as, for example, walking behind the
hearses, which always passed in front of our house. Whenever he looked
over at us, as he occasionally did, we stopped playing and crept back
into the house.

On another side an old well formed the boundary between our garden and
the next. Shaded by trees and deep, as it was, with its rickety wooden
roof covered with dark green moss, I never could look at it without a
shudder. The longish quadrangle was closed by the garden of a dairy-man
who was treated with the greatest respect by the whole neighborhood on
account of the cows which he owned--and by the courtyard of a dresser of
white leather, the most ill-humored of men. My mother always said of him
that he looked as if he had swallowed one person and was just about to
catch another by the head and take the first bite.

This was the atmosphere in which I lived as a child. It could not have
been more restricted, and yet its impressions live on to the present
day. Still the merry joiner looks at me over the hedge, the morose
minister over the board fence. Still I see the strapping, corpulent
dairy-man standing in his doorway, with his hands in his pockets, in
token that they are not empty; still I look upon the dresser of white
leather, with his bilious yellow face, to whom the mere red cheeks of a
child were an insult, and who always seemed more terrible to me when he
began to smile. Still I sit upon the little bench under the spreading
pear-tree, and while refreshing myself in its shade, wait to see if a
fruit, prematurely ripened by worm-holes, will not drop from its sun-lit
top branches; and the well, the roof of which had to be repaired every
little while, still inspires me with a feeling of dread.

[Illustration: GUNTHER AND HAGEN BROUGHT CAPTIVE BEFORE KRIEMHILD _From
the Painting by Schnorr von Carolsfeld_]

II

My father was of a very serious disposition in his home, outside of it
he was gay and talkative. He had acquired a reputation on account of his
talent for telling fairy-tales; many years passed, however, before we
heard them with our own ears. He could not bear to hear us laugh or make
any noise; on the other hand he was fond of singing hymns, and indeed
worldly songs as well, in the twilight of the long winter evenings, and
loved to have us join in. My mother was excessively good-hearted and
somewhat quick-tempered; the most touching kindliness shone from her
blue eyes; when she felt passio