usness, the
oldest devils, driving out and disarming all laterborn ones, come back
again, and that best shows, without doubt, how they must once have
tortured me.

But by day, as well, my imagination was unusually, and perhaps
unhealthily, active. Ugly people, for example, whom my brother laughed
at and mimicked, filled me with dread. A little hunch-backed tailor--on
either side of whose triangular, deathly-pale face, immoderately long
ears stood out, ears moreover which were bright red and
transparent--could not pass by without my running with screams into the
house; and it almost caused my death when he once, in a passion,
followed me, scolding and calling me a stupid youngster, and upbraiding
my mother because he thought she was making him play the bug-bear in her
domestic discipline. I could not endure the sight of a bone and buried
even the smallest one that came to light in our garden; nay later, when
in Susanna's school, I obliterated with my nails the word "rib" in my
catechism, because it always brought before me the disgusting object
which it designated as vividly as though the object itself lay there in
repulsive decay before my eyes. On the other hand, a rose-leaf, which a
breeze blew to me over the hedge, was as much to me as--nay, more than
the rose itself was to others, and words like tulip and lily, cherry and
apricot, apple and pear, immediately transplanted me into spring,
summer, and autumn; so that in the primer I liked to spell aloud the
pieces in which they occurred better than any others, and grew angry
each time when it was not my turn to do so. Only, unhappily, in the
world one needs the diminishing glass much oftener than the magnifying,
and this holds good even of the beautiful days of youth, except in very
rare cases. For as it is said of horses that they respect man only
because, on account of the construction of their eye, they see in him a
giant, so the child endowed with imagination stands still before a grain
of sand only because it seems to him an insuperable mountain. Things in
themselves therefore cannot set the standard here; on the contrary, one
must inquire about the shadows which they cast; hence the father can
often laugh while the son is enduring the tortures of hell because the
scales by which they weigh are fundamentally different.

An incident, comical in itself, belongs in this place because it throws
a very clear light precisely on this point, so important for education.