o reap the benefit
of his training. He had at no time been robust, and was not to live
long. That winter of 1842 was looking about for victims. The fearful
mornings, when we had to get up in the dark, and wash by the flicker of
a tallow candle--wash, that is if we succeeded in hacking up the ice in
the jug, and in finding some water at the bottom of it--those fearful
mornings proved too much for him. Poor Carl's faces, as he made them
behind people's backs, grew longer and longer, his cough grew hollower
and hollower, and he soon went to rest where there are no canes and no
tallow dips, and all is peace, and even one's grandaunts are seraphs.

The sad event did not, however, take place during my stay in Hamburg. I
spent some six or eight months with my uncle and aunt. She, my Tante
Jaques, was my mother's only sister, and was deeply attached to her; on
me she lavished unvarying kindness and affection. My cousins, all older
than myself, were delighted to have the "little Englishman" in the
house, and the friendship we struck up then has lasted through life.

One of the grandaunts was a sister of Heinrich Heine, the poet. She had
married into the Embden family, and so Heinrich was a sort of cousin of
my mother's. They saw a good deal of one another when my mother was in
her teens, and he was a dreamy youth whom she and the other girls of the
family circle delighted to chaff. His frequent headaches they not
incorrectly ascribed to his mode of living; to be sure, they said, he
looked pale and interesting, but that was only because he had eaten too
much at yesterday's dinner party. "Now, what is the matter with you
again to-day?" said my mother as he sat down opposite her one morning
and watched her shelling peas. "How pale you are! it's that head again,
I suppose?" "Yes, Lottchen, I am ill; it is the head again." "That is
what you are always saying, but I'm sure it is not as bad as you make it
out to be. Come now, am I not right?" "O Lottchen," he said, "you do not
know how I suffer;" and as he sat there musing, she had not the heart
further to chaff him. When the next volume of his poems appeared shortly
afterwards, she knew what had passed through his mind on that occasion,
and perhaps on others when she had shown him friendly sympathy.

He writes:--

"When past thy house at morning
I take my way, to see
Thy face, child, at the window
Is deep delight to me.

Thy dark-brown eyes seem asking