s a loud uproar on
the ship. People shouted and screamed, everybody rushed on deck and
looked into the river. Whether I, too, heard the fall and saw the
life-boat manned I don't remember; but I recollect all the more clearly
my mother's rushing frantically from the cabin and clasping me tenderly
to her heart as her rescued child. So the drama ended happily, but there
had been a terrible scene.

Among the steamer's passengers was a crazy Englishman who was being
taken, under the charge of a keeper, to an insane asylum. While my
mother was asleep the lunatic succeeded in eluding this man's vigilance
and plunged into the river. Of course, there was a tumult on board, and
my mother heard cries of "Fallen into the river!"

"Save!" "He'll drown!" Maternal anxiety instantly applied them to the
child-angler, and she darted up the cabin stairs. I need not describe
the state of mind in which she reached the deck, and her emotion when
she found her nestling in his place, still holding the line in his hand.

As the luckless son of Albion was rescued unharmed, we could look back
upon the incident gaily, but neither of us forgot this anxiety--the
first I was to cause my mother.

I have forgotten everything else that happened on our way home; but when
I think of this first journey, a long one for so young a child, and
the many little trips--usually to Dresden, where my grandmother Ebers
lived--which I was permitted to take, I wonder whether they inspired the
love of travel which moved me so strongly later, or whether it was an
inborn instinct. If a popular superstition is correct, I was predestined
to journey. No less a personage than Friedrich Froebel, the founder of
the kindergarten system, called my attention to it; for when I met him
for the first time in the Institute at Keilhau, he seized my curly hair,
bent my head back, gazed at me with his kind yet penetrating eyes, and
said: "You will wander far through the world, my boy; your teeth are
wide apart."

CHAPTER V. LENNESTRASSE.--LENNE.--EARLY IMPRESSIONS.

Lennestrasse is the scene of the period of my life which began with my
return from Holland. If, coming from the Brandenburg Gate, you follow
the Thiergarten and pass the superb statue of Goethe, you will reach a
corner formed by two blocks of houses. The one on the left, opposite
to the city wall, now called Koniggratz, was then known as
Schulgartenstrasse. The other, on the right, whose windows overlooked
the Th