e life and conduct of my father, of
whom you have not heard very much, for he died before you were born,
but whose mind and likeness are reproduced in you only among all your
brothers and sisters. The disastrous fire which reduced his native
town to ashes destroyed his fortune and that of his relatives; grief
at having lost everything--for the fire broke out in the next house to
his--cost his father his life; and while his mother, who for six years
had been stretched an a bed of pain, where horrible convulsions held her
fast, supported her three little girls by the needlework that she did
in the intervals of suffering, he went as a mere clerk into one of the
leading mercantile houses of Augsburg, where his lively and yet even
temper made him welcome; there he learned a calling, for which, however,
he was not naturally adapted, and came back to the home of his birth
with a pure and stainless heart, in order to be the support of his
mother and his sisters.

"A man can do much when he wishes to do much: join your efforts to my
prayers, and leave the rest in the hands of God."

The prediction of this Puritan woman was fulfilled: a little time
afterwards rector Salfranck was appointed professor at Richembourg,
whither Sand followed him; it was there that the events of 1813 found
him. In the month of March he wrote to his mother:--

"I can scarcely, dear mother, express to you how calm and happy I begin
to feel since I am permitted to believe in the enfranchisement of my
country, of which I hear on every side as being so near at hand,--of
that country which, in my faith in God, I see beforehand free and
mighty, that country for whose happiness I would undergo the greatest
sufferings, and even death. Take strength for this crisis. If by chance
it should reach our good province, lift your eyes to the Almighty, then
carry them back to beautiful rich nature. The goodness of God which
preserved and protected so many men during the disastrous Thirty Years'
War can do and will do now what it could and did then. As for me, I
believe and hope."

Leipzig came to justify Sand's presentiments; then the year 1814
arrived, and he thought Germany free.

On the 10th of December in the same year he left Richembourg with this
certificate from his master:--

"Karl Sand belongs to the small number of those elect young men who are
distinguished at once by the gifts of the mind and the faculties of the
soul; in application and work he surpa