neighboring servant-maid who has been sent across the street to make a purchase, or to draw water.  The fruit-woman throws it a cherry or a pear out of her basket, or a prosperous burgher perhaps even gives it a small coin with which it can buy itself a roll.  The driver cracks his whip in passing; the musician as he goes by draws some tones from his instrument, and whoever does none of all these things at least asks its name and age, or smiles at it.  To be sure, the child must be kept neat and clean.

My brother and I came in for a bountiful share of this goodwill, especially on the part of the tenants of our house, our special neighbors who were almost as much to us as our mother and more than our severe father.  In summer they had their work and could not pay much attention to us, but then at that season it was not necessary that they should, as we played in the garden from early till late, from one bed-time to the next, and the butterflies were company enough.  But in winter, in the rain and snow, when we were confined to the house, almost everything that entertained and enlivened us came from them.

The wife of the day laborer, Meta by name, was a gigantic figure, somewhat bent forward, with a stern Old-Testament face, of which I was vividly reminded by Michaelangelo’s Cumaean sybil in the Sistine Chapel.  She usually came over to us at twilight in the long winter evenings, with a red cloth wound around her head, and stayed until the lights were lit.  Then she told us stories of witches and goblins, that sounded more impressive from her lips than from any other.  We heard of the Blocksberg and the witches-Sabbath; the broomstick, so contemptible in appearance, acquired a weird importance, and the dark hole in the chimney, which in every house, and therefore in ours also, can be misused in such malignant fashion by the powers of hell and their handmaids, inspired us with dread.  I can still remember perfectly the impression made upon me by the story of the wicked miller’s wife, who transformed herself at night into a cat, and how I consoled myself with the fact that in the end she did indeed receive due punishment for this wicked prank.  The cat, namely, when once starting out on her nightly walk, had a paw chopped off by the miller’s apprentice, who thought she looked suspicious, and the next day the miller’s wife lay in bed with a bloody right arm minus a hand.

When the light was lit we usually went over to neighbor Ohl’s, and in his room we certainly felt more at ease than in Meta’s company.  Neighbor Ohl was a man whom I have never seen cross, no matter how often he had occasion to be so.  With an empty stomach, indeed with what in his case meant more, an empty pipe, he danced, sang, and whistled something for us whenever we came; and in spite of his considerably reddened nose—­which, according to a tale of my mother’s, I once wished for longingly when looking up at him while being danced upon his knees—­and in spite of the felt cap tapering