As soon as the penitentiary had given its charge back to the community we were obliged to leave the abode in which our grandparents had shared joy and sorrow for over half a century.  It seemed like the end of the world to my brother and myself when the old pieces of furniture, which up till then had scarcely been moved from their places even when the rooms were whitewashed, suddenly emigrated into the street; when the respectable old Dutch striking-clock that never went correctly and always caused confusion, all at once found itself hanging on a branch of the pear tree, brightly illuminated by the beams of the May sun, while under it stood insecurely the round worm-eaten dining-table which, when there happened to be very little on it, had so often elicited from us the wish that we could have everything that had ever been eaten off it.  However, the whole affair was also, quite naturally, in the nature of a spectacle for us, and as in the course of clearing out, a bright colored pipe-head that I had lost a long time before came to light again in some rat hole or other, and, moreover, various odds and ends, which the other families who were moving out with us had come across when dusting in the corners and did not consider worth taking along, fell to our share—­since we could make use of the least thing—­the day soon began to seem like a holiday.  We parted, not indeed without emotion but still without sorrow, from the house in which we had been born.

I did not learn what it really meant until later, though to be sure it was soon enough.  Without realizing it myself I had, up to that time, been a little aristocrat, and now ceased to be one.  This is how it was.  In the same way that the peasant proprietor and the rich burgher look down However, in the end, all this had a very good effect upon me.  I had been up to that time a dreamer, who in the daytime liked to creep away behind the hedge or the well, and in the evening cowered in my mother’s lap, or in that of one of our women neighbors, and begged to be told fairy and ghost stories.  Now I was driven out into active life.  It was a question of defending one’s skin, and though I engaged in my first scuffle only “after long hesitation and many, by no means heroic efforts to escape,” yet the result was such, that I no longer tried to avoid the second, and began at the third or fourth quite to relish the idea.  Our declarations of war were even more laconic than those of the Romans or Spartans.  The challenger looked over at his opponent during school-hours, when the teacher had turned his back for a moment, clenched his right fist and laid it over his mouth, or rather over his jaw; the opponent repeated the symbolic sign the next moment that it was safe to do so, without by even so much as a look requiring a more specific manifesto, and at midday, in the churchyard, in the vicinity of an old vault, before which there, was a grass plot, the affair was settled in the presence of the whole school,