one, it is consequently the best.”  No sooner thought than done.  Before a week was passed I was a pupil of the city school.  About the school I remember very little, only that there was a large room with a blackboard, stifling air in spite of the fact that the windows were always open, and an endless number of boys in baize and linen jackets, unkempt and barefoot, or in wooden shoes, which made a fearful noise.  It was very sad.  But even then, as unfortunately in later years, I had so few pleasing illusions about going to school that the conditions previously described to me did not appear specially dreadful when I became personally acquainted with them.  I simply supposed that things had to be thus.  But toward autumn, when my mother arrived on the scene and saw me coming home from school with the wooden-shoe boys, she was beside herself and cast an anxious glance at my hair, which she doubtless thought she could not well trust in such company.  She then had one of her heart-to-heart talks with my father, who was probably told that he had again taken only himself into consideration.  That same day my withdrawal from school was announced to Rector Beda, who lived diagonally across the street from us.  He was not angry at the announcement, declared, on the contrary, to my mother that “he had really been surprised. * * ” Thus far all was well.  Just criticism had been exercised and action had been taken in accord with it.  But now that it was necessary to find something better to substitute for the school, even my mother was at her wits’ end.  Teachers seemed to be, or were in fact, lacking, and as it had been impossible in so short a time to establish relations to the good families of the city, it was decided for the present to let me grow up wild and calmly to wait till something turned up.  But to prevent my lapsing into dense ignorance I was to read an hour daily to my mother and learn some Latin and French words from my father, in addition to geography and history.

“Will you be equal to that, Louis?” my mother had asked.

“Equal to?  What do you mean by ‘equal to?’ Of course I am equal to it.  Your same old lack of confidence in me.”

“Not twenty-four hours ago you yourself were full of doubt about it.”

“I presume the plan did not appeal to me then.  But if it must be, I understand the Prussian pharmacopoeia as well as anybody, and in my parents’ house French was spoken.  As for the rest, to speak of it would be ridiculous.  You know that in such things I am more than a match for ten graduates.”

As a matter of fact he really gave me lessons, which, I may say in advance, were kept up even after the need of them no longer existed, and, peculiar as these lessons were, I learned more from them than from many a famous teacher.  My father picked out quite arbitrarily the things he had long known by heart or, perhaps, had just read the same day, and vitalized geography with history, always, of course, in such a way that in the end his favorite themes were given due prominence.  For example: