teacher's eyes. And
yet we were true, genuine boys, whose overplus of strength found vent
not only in play, but all sorts of foolish tricks.

A smile still hovers around my lips when I think of the frozen snow-man
on whose head we put a black cap and then placed in one of the younger
teacher's rooms to personate a ghost, and the difficulty we had
in transporting the monster, or when I remember our pranks in the
dormitory.

I believe I am mentioning these cheerful things here to give myself a
brief respite, for the portion of my life which followed is the one I
least desire to describe.

Rousseau says that man's education is completed by art, Nature, and
circumstances. The first two factors had had their effect upon me, and
I was now to learn for the first time to reckon independently with the
last; hitherto they had been watched and influenced in my favour by
others. This had been done not only by masters of the art of pedagogy,
but by their no less powerful co-educators, my companions, among whom
there was not a single corrupt, ill-disposed boy. I was now to learn
what circumstances I should find in my new relations, and in what way
they would prove teachers to me.

I was to be placed at school in Kottbus, at that time still a little
manufacturing town in the Mark. My mother did not venture to keep me in
Berlin during the critical years now approaching. Kottbus was not far
away, and knowing that I was backward in the science that Dr. Boltze,
the mathematician, taught, she gave him the preference over the heads of
the other boarding-schools in the Mark.

I was not reluctant to undertake the hard work, yet I felt like a colt
which is led from the pastures to the stable.

A visit to my grandmother in Dresden, and many pleasures which I was
permitted to share with my brothers and sisters, seemed to me like the
respite before execution.

My mother accompanied me to my new school, and I can not describe the
gloomy impression made by the little manufacturing town on the flat
plains of the Mark, which at that time certainly possessed nothing that
could charm a boy born in Berlin and educated in a beautiful mountain
valley.

In front of Dr. Boltze's house we found the man to whose care I was to
be entrusted. At that time he was probably scarcely forty years old,
short in stature and very erect, with a shrewd face whose features
indicated an iron sternness of character, an impression heightened by
the thick, bushy br