rt to him, and he had entered in all
his majesty.

What had taken place in my soul was made manifest shortly afterward. For
one evening when once again the wind blew mightily down the chimney,
and the rain beat hard upon the roof as I was being put to bed, the
mechanical babbling of my lips was suddenly transformed into a real,
anxious prayer, and therewith the spiritual navel-string, which up to
that time had bound me exclusively to my parents, was broken. Indeed
things soon went so far that I began to complain to God of my father and
mother when I thought I had been unjustly treated by them.

Further there is connected with this school-room my first and perhaps
most bitter martyrdom. In order to make plain what I would say I must
explain a little. Even in the infant-school all the elements are to be
found which the maturer man later encounters in an intensified degree,
in the world. Brutality, deceit, vulgar cleverness, hypocrisy, all are
represented, and a pure mind always stands there, like Adam and Eve in
the picture, among the wild beasts. How much of this is to be ascribed
to nature, how much to early education, or rather to neglect in the
home, must remain undecided here; the fact admits of no doubt. This,
then, was likewise the case in Wesselburen. Every species was to be met
with, from the brutal boy who plucked the feathers from the living birds
and pulled the legs off the flies, down to the light-fingered little
rascal, who stole the bright colored book-marks out of the primers of
his comrades. The fate which their better-behaved fellow-pupils--who
were condemned to suffer on that account--sometimes angrily prophesied
for the young sinners, when the good boys had happened to be the object
of their jeers or their malicious tricks, was fulfilled to the letter in
the case of more than one of them. The gamins always have instinct
enough to know whom their sting will strike first and sharpest, and
therefore I was, for a time, the one most exposed to their spite.
Sometimes a boy pretended to be reading very zealously in the catechism,
which he held close before his face, but instead he whispered over the
top of the page all sorts of scurrilous things in my ear, and asked me
if I were still stupid enough to believe that children came out of the
well, and that the stork fetched them up? Sometimes another called to me
"If you want an apple, take it out of my pocket, I brought one along for
you!" And when I did so, h