to give up and leave the town. I wish I could
remember the verses, but I never was any good for remembering poetry,
and it was a long, long time ago--more than three score years ago now.

"We thought it was funny that Karl never gave over playing with the
girls--his sister and Jenny von Westphalen. When we were all big boys
and ashamed to be seen playing with girls, he would play with them
just the same, and sometimes when we asked him to play with us he
would say, 'No, boys, I'm going to play with Jenny and Sophie this
afternoon.' We'd be mad enough at this, for he was a good fellow to
have in a game, and sometimes we would try to tease him out of it.
But he could call names better than we could, and then we were all
afraid of his terrible verses. So we let him alone lest he make us
look silly with his poetry.

"Well, I left school long before Karl did. My father was poor, you
see, and there were nine of us children to feed and clothe, so I had
to go to work. But I always used to be hearing of Karl's cleverness.
People would talk about him in father's shop and say, 'That boy Marx
will be a Minister of State some day.'

"By and by we heard that he had gone to Bonn, to the University, and
everybody thought that he would soon become a great man. Father was
puzzled when Heinrich Marx came in one day and talked very sadly about
Karl. He said that Karl had wasted all his time at Bonn and learned
nothing, only getting into a bad scrape and spending a lot of money.
Father tried to cheer him up, but he was not to be comforted. 'My
Karl--the child in whom all my hopes were centered--the brightest boy
in Treves--is a failure,' he said over and over again.

[Illustration: JOHANNA BERTHA JULIE JENNY VON WESTPHALEN.]

"Soon after that Karl came home and I saw him nearly every day upon
the streets. He was most always with Jenny von Westphalen, and people
smiled and nodded their heads when the two passed down the street. My!
What a handsome couple they made! Jenny was the beauty of the town,
and all the young men were crazy about her. They wrote poems about her
and called her all the names of the goddesses, but she had no use for
any of the fellows except Karl. And he was as handsome a fellow as
ever laughed into a girl's eyes. He was tall and straight as a line,
and had the most wonderful eyes I ever saw in my life. They seemed to
dance whenever he smiled, but sometimes they flashed fire--when he was
vexed, I mean. But I suppos