sed at the meeting, but unfortunately I was yet
too honest and truthful, so I signally failed and blushed like a girl.
Not like those girls though; they didn't seem to blush, the little
fiends. With the exception of just one, they tittered right over the
banisters, whispered, and shook locks and dangled satchels until I was
quite discomfited. I suppose they thought it rich fun, for they knew,
long before I was aware of it myself, that I was desperately in love
with Helene. It was the tittering, I am sure, that finally put me on the
track, and the whispering that opened my eyes to the blindness I was
stricken with. That was one day when those rosy, mischievous, young
amorettes must have said something particularly unkind to their sister,
for she bounded past me and her tormentors, like a deer, to get rid of
the lot of us. After this I felt an ever-growing desire to see Helene,
but took a dislike to the staircase as a meeting-place.

About this time, as luck would have it, I came across her two brothers,
fair chubby boys about my age. We struck up a sort of friendship, and I
took care the sort should be improved upon, interested as I was in
securing their good-will. It was, above all, important to get reliable
information as to where and when _she_ could be met out skating, and my
new friends, I found, were particularly sympathetic and communicative
when under the influence of a certain kind of "apfelkuchen," an open
apple tart, dispensed on most advantageous terms in the Barfussgaesschen.
There the Frau Bakermistress often had to open for me a little shutter
in a shutter and hand out, on a piece of newspaper, large segments of
the Kuchen, bidding it God-speed with a parting jerk of the perforated
tin sugar-box. Perhaps to show that there was no bribery or corruption
in my standing treat, and, perhaps too, as one's appetite at the age of
sixteen is rather stimulated than blunted by love, I took my fair share
of the segments. These symposia led, in the most natural of ways, to our
making appointments to meet on this or that frozen pond or river, and I
was sure to be punctual, knowing as I did, from information received,
that Helene would be there. More than once I skated along that narrow
river, the Pleisse, for miles, pushing before me the "Stuhlschlitten,"
with its precious many-locked burden. Helene was comfortably ensconced
in that elementary specimen of a sledge, a sort of easy-chair on skates,
and was wrapped up in fu