the fairest and the best of women, and if I make the suffering Stephanus
in Homo Sum say, "For every child his own mother is the best mother,"
mine certainly was to me. My heart rejoiced when I perceived that every
one shared this appreciation. At the time of my birth she was
thirty-five, and, as I have heard from many old acquaintances, in the
full glow of her beauty.

My father had been one of the Berlin gentlemen to whose spirit of
self-sacrifice and taste for art the Konigstadt Theater owed its
prosperity, and was thus brought into intimate relations with Carl von
Holtei, who worked for its stage both as dramatist and actor. When, as a
young professor, I told the grey-haired author in my mother's name
something which could not fail to afford him pleasure, I received the
most eager assent to my query whether he still remembered her. "How I
thank your admirable mother for inducing you to write!" ran the letter.
"Only I must enter a protest against your first lines, suggesting that I
might have forgotten her. I forget the beautiful, gentle, clever,
steadfast woman who (to quote Shakespeare's words) 'came adorned hither
like sweet May,' and, stricken by the hardest blows so soon after her
entrance into her new life, gloriously endured every trial of fate to
become the fairest bride, the noblest wife, most admirable widow, and
most faithful mother! No, my young unknown friend, I have far too much
with which to reproach myself, have brought from the conflicts of a
changeful life a lacerated heart, but I have never reached the point
where that heart ceased to cherish Fanny Ebers among the most sacred
memories of my chequered career. How often her loved image appears before
me when, in lonely twilight hours, I recall the past!"

Yes, Fate early afforded my mother an opportunity to test her character.
The city where shortly before my birth she became a widow was not her
native place. My father had met her in Holland, when he was scarcely more
than a beardless youth. The letter informing his relatives that he had
determined not to give up the girl his heart had chosen was not regarded
seriously in Berlin; but when the lover, with rare pertinacity, clung to
his resolve, they began to feel anxious. The eldest son of one of the
richest families in the city, a youth of nineteen, wished to bind himself
for life--and to a foreigner--a total stranger.

My mother often told us that her father, too, refused to listen to the
young