THE GYMNASIUM AND THE FIRST PERIOD OF UNIVERSITY LIFE.

It was hard for me to leave Keilhau, but our trip to Rudolstadt, to which
my dearest companions accompanied me, was merry enough. With Barop's
permission we had a banquet in the peasant tavern there, whose cost was
defrayed by the kreutzers which had been paid as fines for offences
against table rules. At one of these tables where we larger boys sat,
only French was spoken; at another only the purest German; and we had
ourselves made the rule that whoever used a word of his native tongue at
one, or a foreign one at the other, should be fined a kreutzer.

How merry were these banquets, at which usually several teachers were
welcome guests!

One of the greatest advantages of Keilhau was that our whole lives, and
even our pleasures, were pure enough not to shun a teacher's eyes. And
yet we were true, genuine boys, whose overplus of strength found vent not
only in play, but all sorts of foolish tricks.

A smile still hovers around my lips when I think of the frozen snow-man
on whose head we put a black cap and then placed in one of the younger
teacher's rooms to personate a ghost, and the difficulty we had in
transporting the monster, or when I remember our pranks in the dormitory.

I believe I am mentioning these cheerful things here to give myself a
brief respite, for the portion of my life which followed is the one I
least desire to describe.

Rousseau says that man's education is completed by art, Nature, and
circumstances. The first two factors had had their effect upon me, and I
was now to learn for the first time to reckon independently with the
last; hitherto they had been watched and influenced in my favour by
others. This had been done not only by masters of the art of pedagogy,
but by their no less powerful co-educators, my companions, among whom
there was not a single corrupt, ill-disposed boy. I was now to learn what
circumstances I should find in my new relations, and in what way they
would prove teachers to me.

I was to be placed at school in Kottbus, at that time still a little
manufacturing town in the Mark. My mother did not venture to keep me in
Berlin during the critical years now approaching. Kottbus was not far
away, and knowing that I was backward in the science that Dr. Boltze, the
mathematician, taught, she gave him the preference over the heads of the
other boarding-schools in the Mark.

I was not reluctant to undertake the hard wo