At Easter, 1819, my father took possession of the apothecary’s shop in Neu-Ruppin, which he had acquired at a most favorable price, for a song, so to speak; at Easter, 1826, after three of my four brothers and sisters had been born there, he disposed of the property.  Whenever this early sale of the business became a topic of conversation, it was always characterized as disastrous for my father and the whole family.  But unjustly.  The disastrous feature, which revealed itself many years later—­and fortunately even then in a bearable form, for my papa was truly a lucky man—­lay not in the particular act of the sale, but in the character of my father, who always spent more than his income, and would not have given up the habit, even if he had remained in Neu-Ruppin.  That he confessed to me with his peculiar frankness many, many times, when he had grown old and I was no longer young.  “I was still half a boy when I married,” he was wont to say, “and my too early independence explains everything.”  Whether or not he was right, this is not the place to say.  Generally speaking, his habits were anything but businesslike; he took his dreams of good fortune for realities and applied himself to the cultivation of “noble passions,” without ever stopping to think that at best he had but modest means at his disposal.  His first extravagance was a horse and carriage; then he soon acquired a passion for gaming, and, during the seven years from 1819 to 1826, he gambled away a small fortune.  The chief winner was the lord of a neighboring manor.  When, thirty years later, the son of this lord loaned me a small sum of money, my father said to me:  “Don’t hesitate to take the money; his father took ten thousand thalers from me at dummy whist, a little at a time.”  Perhaps this figure was too high, but however that may be, the sum was at all events large enough to throw his credit and debit out of balance and to make him, among other things, a very tardy payer of interest.  Now in ordinary circumstances, if, for example, he could have had recourse to mortgages and the like, this would not have been, for a time at least, a wholly unbearable situation; but unfortunately it so happened that my father’s chief creditor was his own father, who now took occasion to give expression to his only too justified displeasure, both in letters and in personal interviews.  To make the situation even more oppressive, these reproaches were approved, and hence made doubly severe, by my mother, who stood wholly on her father-in-law’s side.  In short, the further matters went, the more my father was placed between two fires, and for no other reason than to extricate himself from a position which continually injured his pride he resolved to sell the property and business, the exceptional productiveness of which was as well known to him as to anybody else, in spite of the fact that he was the very opposite of a business man.  After all, his whole plan proved to be, at least in the beginning and from his point of view,