At Heidelberg the February before I had had an interview with Schenkel, then the leading theologian of that university.  Him I found in his Studir-Zimmer without fire on a cold day.  He seemed to scorn the use of the Kachelofen, the great porcelain stove, and was wrapped from head to foot in a heavy woollen robe which enveloped him and was prolonged about his head into a kind of cowl.  He presented a figure closely like the portraits of some old reformers heavily mantled in a garb approaching the monkish Tracht which they had forsaken.  It seemed out of character for Schenkel, for he was an avowed liberal and particularly far away from old standards, but the sharp winter drove a champion of heterodoxy into this outer conformity with the old.  In the case of the Berlin Gelehrten, however, the mediaeval dress was quite discarded.  I chanced to see them in the spring with their windows wide open to the perfume of gardens and songs of nightingales, and in the case of Mommsen, my picture of his environment has traits of geniality, for he sat in light summer attire, his face aglow with fatherly impulses as he played in the soft air with his children.

One of the most interesting men whom I met in Berlin was Hermann Grimm, then just rising among the characters of mark, but best known at that time as the son of the famous Wilhelm Grimm and the nephew of Jakob Grimm,—­the “Brothers Grimm,” whose names through their connection with the fairy tales are stamped in the memories not only of men and women, but of children throughout the civilised world.  The “Brothers Grimm,” it must be remembered, were scholars of the profoundest.  The Teutonic folk-lore engaged them not simply or mainly as a source of amusement, but as a subject proper for deep investigation.  They painfully gathered in out-of-the-way nooks from the lips of old grandames in chimney corners and wandering singers in obscure villages, the survivals of the primitive superstitions of the people.  These they subjected to scientific study as illustrating the evolution of society, a deep persistent search with results elaborately systematised, of which the delightful tales so widely circulated are only a by-product.  Aside from their service in the field of folk-lore they grappled with many another mighty task.  The vast dictionary, in which German words are not only set down in their present meaning but followed throughout every stage of their etymology with their relations to their congeners in other tongues indefatigably traced out, is a marvel of erudition.  Theirs also was the great Deutsche Grammatik, a philosophical setting forth of the German tongue in its connection with its far-spreading Aryan affinities.  The “Brothers Grimm” were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they are not divided.  Jakob was never married.  Wilhelm was married, the child of the union being the distinguished man with whom it was my fortune to talk.