This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of thefile for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making anentire meal of them. D.W.]
It was hard for me to leave Keilhau, but our trip to Rudolstadt, to whichmy dearest companions accompanied me, was merry enough. With Barop'spermission we had a banquet in the peasant tavern there, whose cost wasdefrayed by the kreutzers which had been paid as fines for offencesagainst table rules. At one of these tables where we larger boys sat,only French was spoken; at another only the purest German; and we hadourselves made the rule that whoever used a word of his native tongue atone, or a foreign one at the other, should be fined a kreutzer.
How merry were these banquets, at which usually several teachers werewelcome guests!
One of the greatest advantages of Keilhau was that our whole lives, andeven our pleasures, were pure enough not to shun a teacher's eyes. Andyet we were true, genuine boys, whose overplus of strength found vent notonly in play, but all sorts of foolish tricks.
A smile still hovers around my lips when I think of the frozen snow-manon whose head we put a black cap and then placed in one of the youngerteacher's rooms to personate a ghost, and the difficulty we had intransporting the monster, or when I remember our pranks in the dormitory.
I believe I am mentioning these cheerful things here to give myself abrief respite, for the portion of my life which followed is the one Ileast desire to describe.
Rousseau says that man's education is completed by art, Nature,and circumstances. The first two factors had had their effect upon me,and I was now to learn for the first time to reckon independently withthe last; hitherto they had been watched and influenced in my favour byothers. This had been done not only by masters of the art of pedagogy,but by their no less powerful co-educators, my companions, among whomthere was not a single corrupt, ill-disposed boy. I was now to learnwhat circumstances I should find in my new relations, and in what waythey would prove teachers to me.
I was to be placed at school in Kottbus, at that time still a littlemanufacturing town in the Mark. My mother did not venture to keep me inBerlin during the critical years now approaching. Kottbus was not faraway, and knowing that I was backward in the science that Dr. Boltze,the mathematician, taught, she gave him the preference over the headsof the other boarding-schools in the Mark.
I was not reluctant to undertake the hard work, yet I felt like a coltwhich is led from the pastures to the stable.
A visit to my grandmother in Dresden, and many pleasures which I waspermitted to share with my brothers and sisters, seemed to me like therespite before execution.
My mother accompanied me to my new school, and I can not describe thegloomy impression made by the little manufacturing town on the flatplains of the Mark, which at that time certainly possessed nothing thatcould charm a boy born in Berlin and educated in a beautiful mountainvalley.
In front of Dr. Boltze's house we found the man to whose care I was to beentrusted. At that time he was probably scarcely forty years old, short