not his "Come, let us live for our children,"
beamed so invitingly in his clear eyes. People did not think whether he
was handsome or not; his features bore the impress of his intellectual
power so distinctly that the first glance revealed the presence of a
remarkable man.

Yet I must confess--and his portrait agrees with my memory--that his
face by no means suggested the idealist and man of feeling; it seemed
rather expressive of shrewdness, and to have been lined and worn by
severe conflicts concerning the most diverse interests. But his voice
and his glance were unusually winning, and his power over the heart of
the child was limitless. A few words were sufficient to win completely
the shyest boy whom he desired to attract; and thus it happened that,
even when he had been with us only a few weeks, he was never seen
crossing the court-yard without a group of the younger pupils hanging to
his coattails and clasping his hands and arms.

Usually they were persuading him to tell stories, and when he
condescended to do so, older ones flocked around him too, and they were
never disappointed. What fire, what animation the old man had retained!
We never called him anything but "Oheim." The word "Onkel" he detested
as foreign, because it was derived from "avunculus" and "oncle." With
the high appreciation he had of "Tante"--whom he termed, next to the
mother, the most important factor of education in the family--our
"Oheim" was probably specially agreeable to him.

He was thoroughly a self-made man. The son of a pastor in Oberweissbach,
in Thuringia, he had had a dreary childhood; for his mother died
young, and he soon had a step-mother, who treated him with the utmost
tenderness until her own children were born. Then an indescribably sad
time began for the neglected boy, whose dreamy temperament vexed even
his own father. Yet in this solitude his love for Nature awoke. He
studied plants, animals, minerals; and while his young heart vainly
longed for love, he would have gladly displayed affection himself, if
his timidity would have permitted him to do so. His family, seeing him
prefer to dissect the bones of some animal rather than to talk with his
parents, probably considered him a very unlovable child when they sent
him, in his tenth year, to school in the city of Ilm.

He was received into the home of the pastor, his uncle Hoffman, whose
mother-in-law, who kept the house, treated him in the most cordial
manner, and help