rk, yet I felt like a colt
which is led from the pastures to the stable.

A visit to my grandmother in Dresden, and many pleasures which I was
permitted to share with my brothers and sisters, seemed to me like the
respite before execution.

My mother accompanied me to my new school, and I can not describe the
gloomy impression made by the little manufacturing town on the flat
plains of the Mark, which at that time certainly possessed nothing that
could charm a boy born in Berlin and educated in a beautiful mountain
valley.

In front of Dr. Boltze's house we found the man to whose care I was to be
entrusted. At that time he was probably scarcely forty years old, short
in stature and very erect, with a shrewd face whose features indicated an
iron sternness of character, an impression heightened by the thick, bushy
brows which met above his nose.

He himself said that people in Pomerania believed that men with such
eyebrows stood in close relations to Satan. Once, while on his way in a
boat from Greifswald to the island of Rugen, the superstitious sailors
were on the point of throwing him overboard because they attributed their
peril to him as the child of the devil, yet, he added--and he was a
thoroughly truthful man--the power which these strange eyebrows gave him
over others, and especially over men of humble station, induced them to
release him.

But after we had learned what a jovial, indulgent comrade was hidden
behind the iron tyrant who gazed so threateningly at us from the black
eyes beneath the bushy brows, our timidity vanished, and at last we found
it easy enough to induce him to change a resolute "No" into a yielding
"Yes."

His wife, on the contrary, was precisely his opposite, for she wielded
the sceptre in the household with absolute sway, though so fragile a
creature that it seemed as if a breath would blow her away. No one could
have been a more energetic housekeeper. She was as active an assistant to
her husband with her pen as with her tongue. Most of my reports are in
her writing. Besides this, one pretty, healthy child after another was
born, and she allowed herself but a brief time for convalescence. I was
the godfather of one of these babies, an honour shared by my school-mate,
Von Lobenstein. The baptismal ceremony was performed in the Boltze house.
The father and we were each to write a name on a slip of paper and lay it
beside the font. We had selected the oddest ones we could think of, an