. But our intercourse with Nature
had been limited to formal visits which we were permitted to pay the
august lady at stated intervals. In Keilhau she became a familiar
friend, and we therefore were soon initiated into many of her secrets;
for none seemed to be withheld from our Middendorf and Barop, whom
duty and inclination alike prompted to sharpen our ears also for her
language.

The Keilhau games and walks usually led up the mountains or into the
forest, and here the older pupils acted as teachers, but not in any
pedagogical way. Their own interest in whatever was worthy of note in
Nature was so keen that they could not help pointing it out to their
less experienced companions.

On our "picnics" from Berlin we had taken dainty mugs in order to drink
from the wells; now we learned to seek and find the springs themselves,
and how delicious the crystal fluid tastes from the hollow of the hand,
Diogenes's drinking-cup!

Old Councillor Wellmer, in the Crede House, in Berlin, a zealous
entomologist, owned a large collection of beetles, and had carefully
impaled his pets on long slender pins in neat boxes, which filled
numerous glass cases. They lacked nothing but life. In Keilhau we found
every variety of insect in central Germany, on the bushes and in the
moss, the turf, the bark of trees, or on the flowers and blades of
grass, and they were alive and allowed us to watch them. Instead of
neatly written labels, living lips told us their names.

We had listened to the notes of the birds in the Thiergarten; but our
mother, the tutor, the placards, our nice clothing, prohibited our
following the feathered songsters into the thickets. But in Keilhau we
were allowed to pursue them to their nests. The woods were open to every
one, and nothing could injure our plain jackets and stout boots. Even
in my second year at Keilhau I could distinguish all the notes of the
numerous birds in the Thuringian forests, and, with Ludo, began the
collection of eggs whose increase afforded us so much pleasure. Our
teachers' love for all animate creation had made them impose bounds on
the zeal of the egg-hunters, who were required always to leave one egg
in the nest, and if it contained but one not to molest it. How many
trees we climbed, what steep cliffs we scaled, through what crevices we
squeezed to add a rare egg to our collection; nay, we even risked our
limbs and necks! Life is valued so much less by the young, to whom it is
brightes