On my return from school to my father’s house, I found there, too, the horrors of devastation.  Our pear-tree had lost not only its young fruit but likewise all its beautiful leaves, and stood there bare as in winter:  what is more, a very fruitful plum-tree, which used to supply not only ourselves but half the town besides, and, at the very least, our fairly numerous kinsfolk, had even been despoiled of the richest of its branches, and in its mutilation looked like a man with a broken arm.  Though my mother found a sorry comfort in the fact that our pig was now supplied with dainty fare for a week, I could derive none at all from it, and even the pieces of glass lying around in abundance—­from which the most excellent mirrors could be made in the easiest way in the world by sticking them together with damp earth—­offered scarcely any compensation for the irrecoverably lost autumn pleasures.  Now, however, I understood all at once why my father always went to church on Sunday, and, why I was never allowed to put on a clean shirt without saying:  “God’s mercy upon us!” when I did so.  I had learned to know the Lord of Lords; his angry servants, thunder and lightning, hail and storm, had opened wide the portals of my heart to him, and he had entered in all his majesty.

What had taken place in my soul was made manifest shortly afterward.  For one evening when once again the wind blew mightily down the chimney, and the rain beat hard upon the roof as I was being put to bed, the mechanical babbling of my lips was suddenly transformed into a real, anxious prayer, and therewith the spiritual navel-string, which up to that time had bound me exclusively to my parents, was broken.  Indeed things soon went so far that I began to complain to God of my father and mother when I thought I had been unjustly treated by them.

Further there is connected with this school-room my first and perhaps most bitter martyrdom.  In order to make plain what I would say I must explain a little.  Even in the infant-school all the elements are to be found which the maturer man later encounters in an intensified degree, in the world.  Brutality, deceit, vulgar cleverness, hypocrisy, all are represented, and a pure mind always stands there, like Adam and Eve in the picture, among the wild beasts.  How much of this is to be ascribed to nature, how much to early education, or rather to neglect in the home, must remain undecided here; the fact admits of no doubt.  This, then, was likewise the case in Wesselburen.  Every species was to be met with, from the brutal boy who plucked the feathers from the living birds and pulled the legs off the flies, down to the light-fingered little rascal, who stole the bright colored book-marks out of the primers of his comrades.  The fate which their better-behaved fellow-pupils—­who were condemned to suffer on that account—­sometimes angrily prophesied for the young sinners, when the good boys had happened to be the object of their jeers