times, he told us, the mountain sides
and the bottom of the whole valley had been clothed with dense oak
forests. Then people came who wanted to till the ground. They began to
clear (lichten) these woods at Lichtstadt. This was a difficult task,
and they had used axes (Keile) for the purpose. At Eichfeld they felled
the oaks (Fiche), and carried the trunks to Schaale, where the bark
(Schale) was stripped off to make tan for the tanners on the Saale. So
the name of Lichtstadt came from the clearing of the forests, Eichfeld
from the felling of the oaks, Schaale from stripping off the bark, and
Keilhau from the hewing with axes.

This simple tale of ancient times had sprung from the Thuringian soil,
so rich in legends, and, little as it might satisfy the etymologist,
it delighted me. I believed it, and when afterward I looked down from
a height into the valley and saw the Saale, my imagination clothed the
bare or pineclad mountain slopes with huge oak forests, and beheld the
giant forms of the ancient Thuringians felling the trees with their
heavy axes.

The idea of violence which seemed to be connected with the name of
Keilhau had suddenly disappeared. It had gained meaning to me, and Herr
Middendorf had given us an excellent proof of a fundamental requirement
of Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the institution: "The external must
be spiritualized and given an inner significance."

The same talented pedagogue had said, "Our education associates
instruction with the external world which surrounds the human being as
child and youth"; and Middendorf carried out this precept when, at
the first meeting, he questioned us about the trees and bushes by the
wayside, and when we were obliged to confess our ignorance of most of
them, he mentioned their names and described their peculiarities.

At last we reached the Keilhau plain, a bowl whose walls formed
tolerably high mountains which surrounded it on all sides except toward
Rudolstadt, where an opening permitted the Schaalbach to wind through
meadows and fields. So the village lies like an egg in a nest open in
one direction, like the beetle in the calyx of a flower which has lost
one of its leaves. Nature has girded it on three sides with protecting
walls which keep the wind from entering the valley, and to this, and the
delicious, crystal-clear water which flows from the mountains into
the pumps, its surprising healthfulness is doubtless due. During my
residence there of f