nty-one. They Were my parents....

I was born there on the 30th of December that same year. With my
mother it was a matter of life and death, for which reason, whenever
she was twitted with favoring me, she was accustomed simply to reply:
"That is because I suffered most for him." In this favored position I
remained a long time, some eighteen years, till the birth of a late
child, my youngest sister, for whom I stood sponsor and whom I even
held during the christening. This was a great honor for me, but with
it went hand in hand my dethronement by this very sister. It goes
without saying that as the youngest child she straightway became the
darling of the family.

At Easter, 1819, my father took possession of the apothecary's shop in
Neu-Ruppin, which he had acquired at a most favorable price, for a
song, so to speak; at Easter, 1826, after three of my four brothers
and sisters had been born there, he disposed of the property. Whenever
this early sale of the business became a topic of conversation, it
was always characterized as disastrous for my father and the whole
family. But unjustly. The disastrous feature, which revealed itself
many years later--and fortunately even then in a bearable form, for my
papa was truly a lucky man--lay not in the particular act of the sale,
but in the character of my father, who always spent more than his
income, and would not have given up the habit, even if he had remained
in Neu-Ruppin. That he confessed to me with his peculiar frankness
many, many times, when he had grown old and I was no longer young. "I
was still half a boy when I married," he was wont to say, "and my too
early independence explains everything." Whether or not he was right,
this is not the place to say. Generally speaking, his habits were
anything but businesslike; he took his dreams of good fortune for
realities and applied himself to the cultivation of "noble passions,"
without ever stopping to think that at best he had but modest means at
his disposal. His first extravagance was a horse and carriage; then he
soon acquired a passion for gaming, and, during the seven years from
1819 to 1826, he gambled away a small fortune. The chief winner was
the lord of a neighboring manor. When, thirty years later, the son of
this lord loaned me a small sum of money, my father said to me: "Don't
hesitate to take the money; his father took ten thousand thalers from
me at dummy whist, a little at a time." Perhaps this figure wa