For the rest the modest acquisitions that I had made at Susanna’s sufficed to procure for me a certain respect at home.  To Master Ohl it was immensely impressive that I soon knew better than he himself all that the true Christian believes, and my mother was almost moved to tears when for the first time I read the evening blessing aloud by lamp-light, without faltering or stammering.  Indeed she felt so edified that she gave over to me forever the office of reader, the duties of which I hereafter performed for a considerable length of time with much zeal and not without self-complacency.

Toward the end of my sixth year a great change, nay a complete transformation, took place in the school-system in Holstein, and consequently in that of my own little fatherland.  Up to that time the State had not interfered at all in primary instruction and but little in the secondary.  Parents could send their children wherever they wished and the primary schools were purely private institutions, about which even the ministers scarcely troubled themselves, and which often sprang up in the most curious manner.  Thus Susanna had arrived in Wesselburen one stormy autumn evening, in wooden shoes, without a penny, and an entire stranger.  She had been given a night’s lodging, for sweet charity’s sake, by the compassionate widow of a pastor.  The latter discovers that the pilgrim can read and write and also knows quite a little about the Bible and thereupon makes her on the spot the proposition to remain in the town, in her very house, and teach.  The youth of the place, or at least the crawling part of the same, had, as it happened, just been orphaned.  The former teacher, for a long time highly praised on account of his strict discipline, had undressed a saucy little girl and set her upon a hot stove in punishment for some naughtiness, perhaps in order to procure still greater praise thereby, and that had been too much for even the most unqualified reverers of the rod.  Susanna was quite alone in the world, and did not know where she should turn or what she should take up.  She therefore gladly, although according to her own words not without misgivings, exchanged the accustomed labor with her hands for the difficult labor with her head, and the speculation succeeded perfectly, and in the shortest space of time imaginable.

To the boys and girls of more advanced age severe, sombre gymnasiums and grammar-schools did indeed open their doors.  These were under a sort of supervision and in case of necessity were recruited by the secular arm, if new comers did not enlist of their own accord.  But in these institutions too, only the merest manual training was given, in spite of the pompous sounding names which they flaunted, and which to this hour have remained a mystery to me.  A brother of my mother’s, universally admired on account of his talents—­whom the principal, though by no means over modest, had dismissed with the solemn declaration that he could teach him nothing further because he knew as much as he himself—­was indeed a mighty calligrapher, and decorated his New Year’s cards with tints and flourishes in India ink as the old printers Fust and Schoeffer did their incunabula, but nevertheless he could not achieve a single grammatical sentence.