alls that I began to
understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund
of sensations with which I was to break violently by throwing myself into
an unrelated existence. It was like the experience of another world. The
wings of time made a great dusk over all this, and I feared at first that
if I ventured bodily in there I would discover that I who have had to do
with a good many imaginary lives have been embracing mere shadows in my
youth. I feared. But fear in itself may become a fascination. Men have
gone, alone and trembling, into graveyards at midnight--just to see what
would happen. And this adventure was to be pursued in sunshine. Neither
would it be pursued alone. The invitation was extended to us all. This
journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a
tribe. My present, all that gave solidity and value to it, at any rate,
would stand by me in this test of the reality of my past. I was pleased
with the idea of showing my companions what Polish country life was like;
to visit the town where I was at school before the boys by my side should
grow too old, and gaining an individual past of their own, should lose
their unsophisticated interest in mine. It is only in the short instants
of early youth that we have the faculty of coming out of ourselves to see
dimly the visions and share the emotions of another soul. For youth all
is reality in this world, and with justice, since it apprehends so
vividly its images behind which a longer life makes one doubt whether
there is any substance. I trusted to the fresh receptivity of these
young beings in whom, unless Heredity is an empty word, there should have
been a fibre which would answer to the sight, to the atmosphere, to the
memories of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood had received
its earliest independent impressions.

The first days of the third week in July, while the telegraph wires
hummed with the words of enormous import which were to fill blue books,
yellow books, white books, and to arouse the wonder of mankind, passed
for us in light-hearted preparations for the journey. What was it but
just a rush through Germany, to get across as quickly as possible?

Germany is the part of the earth's solid surface of which I know the
least. In all my life I had been across it only twice. I may well say
of it _vidi tantum_; and the very little I saw was through the window of
a railway carriage at