ours, I recall the past!"

Yes, Fate early afforded my mother an opportunity to test her character.
The city where shortly before my birth she became a widow was not her
native place. My father had met her in Holland, when he was scarcely
more than a beardless youth. The letter informing his relatives that
he had determined not to give up the girl his heart had chosen was not
regarded seriously in Berlin; but when the lover, with rare pertinacity,
clung to his resolve, they began to feel anxious. The eldest son of one
of the richest families in the city, a youth of nineteen, wished to bind
himself for life--and to a foreigner--a total stranger.

My mother often told us that her father, too, refused to listen to the
young suitor, and how, during that time of conflict, while she was with
her family at Scheveningen, a travelling carriage drawn by four horses
stopped one day before her parents' unpretending house. From this coach
descended the future mother-in-law. She had come to see the paragon of
whom her son had written so enthusiastically, and to learn whether it
would be possible to yield to the youth's urgent desire to establish a
household of his own. And she did find it possible; for the girl's rare
beauty and grace speedily won the heart of the anxious woman who had
really come to separate the lovers. True, they were required to wait a
few years to test the sincerity of their affection. But it withstood the
proof, and the young man, who had been sent to Bordeaux to acquire in
a commercial house the ability to manage his father's banking business,
did not hesitate an instant when his beautiful fiancee caught the
smallpox and wrote that her smooth face would probably be disfigured by
the malignant disease, but answered that what he loved was not only her
beauty but the purity and goodness of her tender heart.

This had been a severe test, and it was to be rewarded: not the smallest
scar remained to recall the illness. When my father at last made my
mother his wife, the burgomaster of her native city told him that he
gave to his keeping the pearl of Rotterdam. Post-horses took the young
couple in the most magnificent weather to the distant Prussian capital.
It must have been a delightful journey, but when the horses were changed
in Potsdam the bride and groom received news that the latter's father
was dead.

So my parents entered a house of mourning. My mother at that time had
only the slight mastery of German acq