his salutations.  He chirped like a thistle-finch; many birds around answered his call, and, ere I was aware, he had disappeared amid the thickets with his little bare feet and his bundle of brush.  “Children,” thought I, “are younger than we; they can remember when they were once trees or birds, and are consequently still able to understand them.  We of larger growth are, alas, too old for that, and carry about in our heads too many sorrows and bad verses and too much legal lore.”  But the time when it was otherwise recurred vividly to me as I entered Clausthal.  In this pretty little mountain town, which the traveler does not behold until he stands directly before it, I arrived just as the clock was striking twelve and the children came tumbling merrily out of school.  The little rogues, nearly all red-cheeked, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, sprang and shouted and awoke in me melancholy and cheerful memories—­how I once myself, as a little boy, sat all the forenoon long in a gloomy Catholic cloister school in Duesseldorf, without so much as daring to stand up, enduring meanwhile a terrible amount of Latin, whipping, and geography, and how I too hurrahed and rejoiced, beyond all measure when the old Franciscan clock at last struck twelve.  The children saw by my knapsack that I was a stranger, and greeted me in the most hospitable manner.  One of the boys told me that they had just had a lesson in religion, and showed me the Royal Hanoverian Catechism, from which they were questioned on Christianity.  This little book was very badly printed, so that I greatly feared that the doctrines of faith made thereby but an unpleasant blotting-paper sort of impression upon the children’s minds.  I was also shocked at observing that the multiplication table—­which surely seriously contradicts the Holy Trinity—­was printed on the last page of the catechism, as it at once occurred to me that by this means the minds of the children might, even in their earliest years, be led to the most sinful skepticism.  We Prussians are more intelligent, and, in our zeal for converting those heathen who are familiar with arithmetic, take good care not to print the multiplication table in the back of the catechism.

I dined at The Crown, at Clausthal.  My repast consisted of spring-green parsley-soup, violet-blue cabbage, a pile of roast veal, which resembled Chimborazo in miniature, and a sort of smoked herring, called “Bueckings,” from the inventor, William Buecking, who died in 1447, and who, on account of the invention, was so greatly honored by Charles V. that the great monarch in 1556 made a journey from Middleburg to Bievlied in Zealand for the express purpose of visiting the grave of the great man.  How exquisitely such dishes taste when we are familiar with their historical associations!

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