Especially would such have been the case when, as usually happened about the first of December, a stag was sent in from the chief forester’s and was hung up, eviscerated, as game usually is, against the gable end of the servants’ house.  Day after day the cook would go to this horrible gable ornament and cut out, first the haunch, then the shoulders and legs, with the result that we always heaved a sigh of relief when the glory of this venison was a thing of the past.

A far happier time was the baking week, which began with spice-nuts and sugar cookies, and ended with bretzels, wreath-cakes, and cakes baked on tins.  Not only were we admitted to the bakeroom, where there was a most alluring odor of bitter almonds and grated lemons; we also received, as a foretaste of Christmas, a bountiful supply of little cake-rolls, baked especially for us children.  “I know,” said my mother, “that the children will upset their stomachs eating them, but even that is better than that they should be restricted to too low a diet.  They shall have joyful holiday feeling during all these days, and nothing can give it to them better than holiday cakes.”  There is something in that view, and it may be absolutely right if the children are thoroughly robust.  But we were not so robust that the principle could be applied to us without modification.  And so, about Christmas time, I was always much given to crying.

On New Year’s Eve there was a club ball, which I, being the oldest child, was allowed to witness.  I took my position in one corner of the hall and looked on with vacillating feelings.  When the dancing couples whirled past me I was happy, on the one hand, because I was permitted to stand there as a sort of guest and share in the pleasure with my eyes, and yet, on the other hand, I was unhappy, because I was merely an onlooker instead of a participator in the dance.  My personal insignificance weighed heavy upon me, doubly heavy because of the gastric condition I was regularly in at this reason, and it continued so until the nightwatchman, wrapped in his long blue cloak, came into the hall at midnight and, after blowing a preliminary signal on his horn, wished everybody a happy New Year.  Then, as if by magic, my feeling of sentimentality vanished entirely, and I was carried away by the comic grotesqueness of the scene, and soon regained my freedom and buoyancy of spirit.

Just about this time social activities began, taking the form of a series of weekly feasts, many of which resembled that of Belshazzar, in so far as a spirit hand was at the very time writing the bankruptcy of the host upon the wall.  However, my knowledge of the details of these feasts was derived only from hearsay.  But any special banquets, whether great or small, that fell to the lot of our own house I saw with my own eyes and it is about these that I now propose to tell.