lso maintain no gentleman ever married a woman older than himself.

The marriage of Major Humboldt and the Baroness von Hollwede was a most
happy mating that fully justified the venture. The Major had done his
work bravely in the Seven Years' War, and was now an attache of the
King's Court--a man of means, of intellect, and of many strong and
beautiful virtues. After the marriage he became known as Baron von
Humboldt, and as to just how he succeeded to the noble title let us not
be curious--his wife undoubtedly bestowed it on him, good and generous
woman that she was.

They lived in the romantic Castle Tegel, near Berlin, and separated from
the city by a park, where the dark pines still tower aloft and murmur
their secrets to the night breeze.

Tegel is a most beautiful place; it was first a hunting-lodge occupied
by Frederick the Great. It is shut out from the world by its high stone
walls; and in its dim, dense woods, one might easily imagine he was far
indeed from the madding crowd.

Here there were two sons born to the Baron and Baroness--two years
apart. One of these sons sleeps now beneath the turret where he first
saw the light, and from which he made others see the light as long as he
lived.

In Goethe's "Faust" is an allusion to a mysterious legend that had its
rise in storied Tegel. On May Eighteenth, in the year Seventeen Hundred
Seventy-eight. Goethe came here, walking over from Berlin, dined, and
walked on to Potsdam. But before he left he saw two beautiful boys, aged
eight and ten, playing beneath the spreading Tegel trees. The boys
remembered the event and wrote of it in their journal, mentioning the
kindly pats on their heads and the prophecy that they would grow up and
be great men.

Goethe was always patting boys on the head and saying graceful things,
and it is doubtful whether his prophecy was more than a mere
commonplace. But Goethe always claimed it was divine prophecy. These
boys were William and Alexander von Humboldt.

History does not supply another instance of two brothers attaining the
intellectual height reached by Alexander and William von Humboldt. This
being so, it seems meet that we should tarry a little to inspect the
method adopted in the education of these boys--something that the
educated world for the most part has not done.

* * * * *

This world of ours, round like an orange and slightly flattened at the
poles, has produced only five men w