After lunch every day, while waiting for the mail-coach to come trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little balcony under the eaves, reading.  He introduced me to his favourite book Till Eulenspiegel, and we sped joyously through the adventures of that immortal buffoon of German folk-lore.  We took turns reading aloud:  every paragraph or so I would appeal for an explanation of something.  Generally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear Ingo strive to make the meaning plain.  What a puckering of his bright boyish forehead, what a grave determination to elucidate the fable!  What a mingling of ecstatic pride in having a grown man as pupil, with deference due to an elder.  Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest transports of glee never forgot his manners!  I would make some purposely ludicrous shot at the sense, and he would double up with innocent mirth.  His clear laughter would ring out, and his mother, pacing a digestive stroll on the highway below us, would look up crying in the German way, “Gott! wie er freut sich!” The progress of our reading was held up by these interludes, but I could never resist the temptation to start Ingo explaining.

Ingo having made me free of his dearest book, it was only fair to reciprocate.  So one day Lloyd and I bicycled down to Freiburg, and there, at a heavenly “bookhandler’s,” I found a copy of ’Treasure Island’ in German.  Then there was revelry in the balcony!  I read the tale aloud, and I wish R.L.S. might have seen the shining of Ingo’s eyes!  Alas, the vividness of the story interfered with the little lad’s sleep, and his mother was a good deal disturbed about this violent yarn we were reading together.  How close he used to sit beside me as we read of the dark doings at the Admiral Benbow:  and how his face would fall when, clear and hollow from the sounding-board of the hills, came the quick clop, clop of the mail-man’s horses.

I don’t know anything that has ever gone deeper in my memory than those hours spent with Ingo.  I have a little snapshot of him I took the misty, sorrowful morning when I bicycled away to Basel and left the Gasthaus zur Krone in its mountain valley.  The blessed little lad stands up erect and stiff in the formal German way, and I can see his blue eyes alight with friendliness, and a little bit unhappy because his eccentric American comrade was gomg away and there would be no more afternoons with Till Eulenspiegel on the balcony.  I wonder if he thinks of me as often as I do of him?  He gave me a glimpse into the innocent heaven of a child’s heart that I can never forget.  By now he is approaching sixteen, and I pray that whatever the war may take away from me it will spare me my Ingo.  It is strange and sad to recall that his parting present to me was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he toiled manfully all one afternoon.  I still have it in my scrapbook.

And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of “Hauff’s Maerchen” that I bought for him in Freiburg, and sees the English words that he was to learn how to translate when he should grow older!  As I remember them, they ran like this: