long before they have learnt that in real life also virtue does not
always receive its reward, while falsehood often prospers, at least
for a time. There is no harm, I think, in a certain dreaminess in
children. I remember that I have often laughed with all my heart at
Rumpelstilzchen, and shed bitter tears at Bruederchen and
Schwesterchen. I seemed to see brother and sister driven into the
wood, the brother being changed into a deer, and the sister sleeping
with her head on his warm fur, till at last the deer was killed by a
huntsman, and the little sister had to travel on quite alone in the
forest. Of course in the end she became a princess, and the brother a
prince who married a queen, and all ended in great joy and jubilation
in which we all joined. How good for children that they should for a
time at least have lived in such a dreamland, in which truthfulness
was as a rule rewarded, and falsehood punished in the end.

It was like a recollection of a Paradise, and such a recollection,
even if it brought out the contrast between the dream-world and the
real world, would often set children musing on what ought and what
ought not to be. They did not long believe in Dornroeschen and
Schneewittchen, they learnt but too soon that Dornroeschen and
Schneewittchen belonged to another world. They may even have come to
learn that Dornroeschen (thorn-rose) and Schneewittchen (snow-white)
were meant originally for the sleep or death of nature in her
snow-white shroud, and the return of the sun; but woe to the boy who
on first learning these stories should have declared that they were
mere bosh, or, as Sir Walter Scott says, the detritus of nature-myths.

My father's father, whom I never knew, seems not to have been
distinguished in any way. He was, however, a useful tradesman and a
respected citizen of Dessau, and, as I see, the founder of the first
lending library in that small town. He married a second time, a rich
widow, chiefly, as I was told, to enable him to give his son, my
father, a liberal education. She grew to be very old, and I well
remember her, to me, forbidding and terrifying appearance. She quite
belonged to a past generation, and when I saw her again after having
been in England, she asked me whether I had seen Napoleon who had been
taken prisoner and sent to England, but had lately escaped and resumed
his throne in Paris. She evidently mixed up the two Napoleons, and I
did not contradict her. To me her convers