e, the exercise of my profession
as a painter. His own work, although very clever in its way, was
niggling and minute, but his ideas and teachings were broad, and whilst
encouraging a taste for form which had made the study of architecture so
attractive to me, he knew how to awaken a love of colour, that was
eventually to lead me to the sister art.

The old masters, too, had their full share in making me long to paint.
There was a certain picture by Murillo, a Madonna and Child, in the
Schletter Collection which afterwards formed the nucleus of the Leipsic
Picture Gallery; that picture so filled my imagination that I was fired
by the desire to go forth and do likewise.

I have since frequently found that that kind of _auch'io_ feeling is by
no means confined to those in whom it would be justifiable. In a
masterpiece the artist betrays no effort; all looks so easy that one
fancies it _is_ easy. The lines of the composition flow so naturally,
the colours strike so complete a chord, that one is deluded into the
belief that it could not be otherwise, and that it is just what one
would have done oneself had one been in the painter's place. So I was
gradually settling in my mind that, as soon as I had passed my
Abiturienten Examen (equivalent to our matriculation), I would, without
much delay, begin to paint like the old masters.

Of Mendelssohn and the many friends, musical and otherwise, who made my
stay, and later on my visits to Leipsic, interesting, I must speak
afterwards. But an incident which has left a lasting impression on my
mind, finds its place here, as being connected partly with my
school-days and partly with my art studies.

CHAPTER II

WILL YOU SIT FOR ME, FRIDA?

I well remember, and I shall ever remember with gratitude, the man who
in my German school-days helped me along the thorny paths of the Latin
and Greek grammar, Herr Magister Dr. Traumann. I suppose I got into
trouble, as much as any boy of sixteen, with the so-called regular, and
those disgracefully irregular, verbs the old Greeks tolerated. But Dr.
Traumann was always kind and helpful; in fact, he was not only a
first-rate teacher but a lovable man. I had, soon after my arrival in
Leipsic, been put under his care, and thanks to his coaching, I got so
well ahead of myself, that although my scholastic antecedents would
really have fitted me more for the "Tertia" class, I could be
pitchforked into "Secunda."

During a temporary absen