e old. For me too, then, it was a moment never
to be forgotten, and one whose influence continues to be felt to the
present day, when my mother took me with her for the first time on the
evening walk which she indulged in on Sundays and holidays during the
beautiful summer months. Good gracious, how large this Wesselburen was!
Five-year old legs were nearly tired out before they had made the entire
round! And what did one not meet on the road! The very names of the
streets and squares sounded so puzzling and fantastic! "Now we are on
the Lollard's Foot! That is White Meadow! This way goes over to Bell
Mountain! There stands the Oak Nest!" The less apparent reason there was
for these names, the more certain it seemed that they concealed some
mystery! And then the objects themselves! The church whose pealing voice
I had already heard so often; the graveyard with its dark trees and its
crosses and tombstones; a very old house, in which a, "forty-eighter"
had lived, and in the cellar of which a treasure was said to lie buried,
over which the devil kept watch; and, finally, a big fish-pond: all
these details coalesced in my mind, as though like the limbs of a
gigantic animal they were organically related, into one huge general
picture, and the autumn moon shed a bluish light over it. Since that
time I have seen St. Peter's and every German cathedral, I have been to
Pere la Chaise and the Pyramid of Cestius, but whenever I think in
general of churches, graveyards and the like, they still hover before me
today in the shape in which I saw them on that evening.

X

About the same time that I exchanged Susanna's gloomy room for the
newly-built bright and pleasant primary-school, my father also had to
leave his little house and move into a hired lodging. That was a strange
contrast for me. School had broadened: I gazed out of clear windows with
wide frames of fir wood, instead of trying my curious eyes on green
glass bottle panes with dirty leaden rims; and the daylight, which at
Susanna's always commenced later and stopped earlier than it should, now
came into its full rights. I sat at a comfortable table with a desk and
an ink bottle; the odor of fresh wood and paint, which still has some
charm for me, threw me into a sort of joyous ecstasy, and when, on
account of my reading, I was told by the inspecting minister, to
exchange the third bench, which I had modestly chosen, for the first,
and moreover to take one of the highest p