ough I was much laughed at. It may be that later in life and
after my grandfather's death I had little opportunity of shooting, but
the cry of the doe and the whimpering of the young ones who tried to
get suck from their dead mother have remained with me for life.

My grandfather, though he aged early, remained in harness as Prime
Minister to the end of his life, and it was his great desire to
benefit his country by new institutions. It was he who, at the time
when people hardly knew yet what railroads meant, succeeded in getting
the line from Berlin to Halle and Leipzig to pass by Dessau. He
offered to build the bridge across the Elbe and to give the land and
the wood for the sleepers gratis, and what seemed at the time a far
too generous offer has proved a blessing to the duchy, making it as it
were the centre of the great railway connecting Berlin, Leipzig,
Magdeburg, the Elbe, Hanover, Bremen, nay, Cologne also, the Rhine,
and Western Europe. He was in his way a good statesman, though we are
too apt to measure a man's real greatness by the circumstances in
which he moves.

As far back as I can remember I was a martyr to headaches. No doctor
could help me, no one seemed to know the cause. It was a migraine, and
though I watched it carefully I could not trace it to any fault of
mine. The idea that it came from overwork was certainly untrue. It
came and went, and if it was one day on the right side it was always
the next time on the left, even though I was free from it sometimes
for a week or a fortnight, or even longer. It was strange also that it
seldom lasted beyond one day, and that I always felt particularly
strong and well the day after I had been prostrate. For prostrate I
was, and generally quite unable to do anything. I had to lie down and
try to sleep. After a good sleep I was well, but when the pain had
been very bad I found that sometimes the very skin of my forehead had
peeled off. In this way I often lost two or three days in a week, and
as my work had to be done somehow, it was often done anyhow, and I was
scolded and punished, really without any fault of my own. After all
remedies had failed which the doctor and nurses prescribed (and I well
remember my grandmother using massage on my neck, which must have
been about 1833 to 1835) I was handed over to Hahnemann, the founder
of homeopathy. Hahnemann (born 1755) had been practising as doctor at
Dessau as early as 1780--that is somewhat before my time--bu