pt and played
during the first years of my childhood possessed, besides a field and
a meadow, an orchard and dense shrubbery, even a hill and a pond. Three
big horses, the property of the owner of our residence, stood in the
stable, and the lowing of a cow, usually an unfamiliar sound to Berlin
children, blended with my earliest recollections.

The Thiergartenstrasse--along which in those days on sunny mornings,
a throng of people on foot, on horseback, and in carriages constantly
moved to and fro--ran past the front of these spacious grounds, whose
rear was bounded by a piece of water then called the "Schafgraben," and
which, spite of the duckweed that covered it with a dark-green network
of leafage, was used for boating in light skiffs.

Now a strongly built wall of masonry lines the banks of this ditch,
which has been transformed into a deep canal bordered by the handsome
houses of the Konigin Augustastrasse, and along which pass countless
heavily laden barges called by the Berliners "Zillen."

The land where I played in my childhood has long been occupied by
the Matthaikirche, the pretty street which bears the same name, and a
portion of Konigin Augustastrasse, but the house which we occupied and
its larger neighbour are still surrounded by a fine garden.

This was an Eden for city children, and my mother had chosen it because
she beheld it in imagination flowing with the true Garden of Paradise
rivers of health and freedom for her little ones.

My father died on the 14th of February, 1837, and on the 1st of March of
the same year I was born, a fortnight after the death of the man in whom
my mother was bereft of both husband and lover. So I am what is termed a
"posthumous" child. This is certainly a sorrowful fate; but though there
were many hours, especially in the later years of my life, in which
I longed for a father, it often seemed to me a noble destiny and one
worthy of the deepest gratitude to have been appointed, from the
first moment of my existence, to one of the happiest tasks, that of
consolation and cheer.

It was to soothe a mother's heartbreak that I came in the saddest hours
of her life, and, though my locks are now grey, I have not forgotten the
joyful moments in which that dear mother hugged her fatherless little
one, and among other pet names called him her "comfort child."

She told me also that posthumous children were always Fortune's
favorites, and in her wise, loving way strove to make