pleasure, and their hearts denied the practice of exercising charity?

Turning my thoughts backward, it seems to me as if almost too much
beauty and pleasure were crowded together at Christmas, richly provided
with presents as we were besides, for over and above the Christmas fair
there was Kroll's Christmas exhibition, where clever heads and skilful
hands transformed a series of great halls, at one time into the domain
of winter, at another into the kingdom of the fairies. There was nothing
to do but look.

Imagination came to a standstill, for what could it add to these
wonders? Yet the fairyland of which Ludo and I had dreamed was more
beautiful and more real than this palpable magnificence of tin
and pasteboard; which is, perhaps, one reason why the overexcited
imagination of a city child shrinks back and tries to find in reality
what a boy brought up in the quiet of the country can conjure up before
his mind himself.

Then, too, there were delightful sights in the Gropius panorama and
Fuchs's confectioner's shop--in the one place entertaining things, in
the other instructive. At the panorama half the world was spread out
before us in splendid pictures, so presented and exhibited as to give
the most vivid impression of reality.

From the letters of our mother's brothers, who were Dutch officials in
Java and Japan, as well as from books of travel which had been read to
us, we had already heard much of the wonders of the Orient; and at the
Gropius panorama the inner call that I had often seemed to hear--"Away!
to the East"--only grew the stronger. It has never been wholly silent
since, but at that time I formed the resolution to sail around the
world, or--probably from reading some book--to be a noble pirate. Nor
should I have been dissatisfied with the fate of Robinson Crusoe.
The Christmas exhibition at Fuchs's, Unter den Linden, was merely
entertaining--Berlin jokes in pictures mainly of a political or
satirical order. Most distinctly of all I remember the sentimental lady
of rank who orders her servant to catch a fly on a tea-tray and put
it carefully out of the window. The obedient Thomas gets hold of the
insect, takes it to the window, and with the remark, "Your ladyship, it
is pouring, the poor thing might take cold," brings it back again to the
tea-tray.

There was plenty of such entertainment in winter, and we had our part
in much of it. Rellstab, the well-known editor of Voss's journal, made
a clever