t judgment followed, and led to my mother's resolution to send her
oldest son away from home to some educational institution.

The well-known teacher, Adolph Diesterweg, whose acquaintance she had
made at the house of a friend, recommended Keilhau, and so our little
band was deprived of the leader to whom Ludo and I had looked up with
a certain degree of reverence on account of his superior strength, his
bold spirit of enterprise, and his kindly condescension to us younger
ones.

After his departure the house was much quieter, but we did not
forget him; his letters from Keilhau were read aloud to us, and his
descriptions of the merry school days, the pedestrian tours, and
sleigh-rides awakened an ardent longing in Ludo and myself to follow
him.

Yet it was so delightful with my mother, the sun around which our little
lives revolved! I had no thought, performed no act, without wondering
what would be her opinion of it; and this intimate relation, though in
an altered form, continued until her death. In looking backward I may
regard it as a law of my whole development that my conduct was regulated
according to the more or less close mental and outward connection in
which I stood with her. The storm and stress period, during which my
effervescent youthful spirits led me into all sorts of follies, was the
only time in my life in which this close connection threatened to be
loosened. Yet Fate provided that it should soon be welded more firmly
than ever. When she died, a beloved wife stood by my side, but she was
part of myself; and in my mother Fate seemed to have robbed me of the
supreme arbitrator, the high court of justice, which alone could judge
my acts.

In Lennestrasse it was still she who waked me, prepared us to go to
school, took us to walk, and--how could I ever forget it?--gathered us
around her "when the lamps were lighted," to read aloud or tell us some
story. But nobody was allowed to be perfectly idle. While my sisters
sewed, I sketched; and, as Ludo found no pleasure in that, she sometimes
had him cut figures out; sometimes--an odd fancy--execute a masterpiece
of crocheting, which usually shared the fate of Penelope's web.

We listened with glowing cheeks to Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian
Nights, Gulliver's Travels and Don Quixote, both arranged for children,
the pretty, stories of Nieritz and others, descriptions of Nature and
travel, and Grimm's fairy tales.

On other winter evenings my mother--thi