uality in
every impression; while, when more advanced in years, we must act with
design, busy ourselves more exclusively with particulars, carefully
exchange the pure gold of observation for the paper currency of book
definitions, and win in _breadth_ of life what we lost in depth.

_Now,_ we are grown-up, respectable people, we often inhabit new
dwellings; the housemaid daily cleans them and changes at her will the
position of the furniture, which interests us but little, as it is
either new or may belong today to Jack, tomorrow to Isaac. Even our very
clothes are strange to us; we hardly know how many buttons there are on
the coat we wear--for we change our garments as often as possible, and
none of them remains deeply identified with our external or inner
history. We can hardly remember how that brown vest once looked, which
attracted so much laughter, and yet on the broad stripes of which the
dear hand of the loved one so gently rested!

The old dame who sat behind the stove opposite the clothes-press wore a
flowered dress of some old-fashioned material, which had been the bridal
robe of her departed mother. Her great-grandson, a fair-haired boy, with
flashing eyes, clad in a miner's dress, sat at her feet and counted the
flowers on her dress. It may be that she has narrated to him many a
story connected with that dress--many serious and pretty stories, which
the boy will not readily forget, which will often recur to him when he,
a grown-up man, works alone in the midnight galleries of the "Caroline,"
and which he in turn will narrate when the dear grandmother has long
been dead, and he himself, a silver-haired, tranquil old man, sits amid
the circle of _his_ grand-children behind the stove, opposite the great
clothes-press.

I lodged that night too in The Crown, where the Court Councilor B----,
of Goettingen, had arrived meanwhile, and I had the pleasure of paying my
respects to the old gentleman. After writing my name in the book of
arrivals, I turned over the leaves of the month of July and found
therein, among others, the much loved name of Adalbert von Chamisso, the
biographer of the immortal _Schlemihl_. The landlord remarked of
Chamisso that the gentleman had arrived during one terrible storm and
departed in another.

The next morning I had again to lighten my knapsack, and threw overboard
an extra pair of boots; then I arose and went on to Goslar, where I
arrived without knowing how. This much alone do I