calyx of a flower which has lost one of its
leaves. Nature has girded it on three sides with protecting walls which
keep the wind from entering the valley, and to this, and the delicious,
crystal-clear water which flows from the mountains into the pumps, its
surprising healthfulness is doubtless due. During my residence there of
four and a half years there was no epidemic disease among the boys, and
on the fiftieth jubilee of the institute, in 1867, which I attended, the
statement was made that during the half century of its existence only one
pupil had died, and he had had heart disease when his parents sent him to
the school.

We must have arrived on Sunday, for we met on the road several peasants
in long blue coats, and peasant women in dark cloth cloaks with
gold-embroidered borders, and little black caps from which ribbons three
or four feet long hung down the wearers' backs. The cloaks descended from
mother to daughter. They were very heavy, yet I afterward saw peasant
women wear them to church in summer.

At last we drove into the broad village street. At the right, opposite to
the first houses, lay a small pond called the village pool, on which
ducks and geese floated, and whose dark surface, glittering with many
hues, reflected the shepherd's hut. After we had passed some very fine
farmhouses, we reached the "Plan," where bright waters plashed into a
stone trough, a linden tree shaded the dancing-ground, and a pretty house
was pointed out as the schoolhouse of the village children.

A short distance farther away the church rose in the background. But we
had no time to look at it, for we were already driving up to the
institute itself, which was at the end of the village, and consisted of
two rows of houses with an open space closed at the rear by the wide
front of a large building.

The bakery, a small dwelling, and the large gymnasium were at our left;
on the right, the so-called Lower House, with the residences of the
head-masters' families, and the school and sleeping-rooms of the smaller
pupils, whom we dubbed the "Panzen," and among whom were boys only eight
and nine years old.

The large house before whose central door--to which a flight of stone
steps led--we stopped, was the Upper House, our future home.

Almost at the same moment we heard a loud noise inside, and an army of
boys came rushing down the steps. These were the "pupils," and my heart
began to throb faster.

They gathered around the R