It was a long time before my conceptions of Meum and Tuum were fully settled, and at a very late period they were at times confused, just as it was a long time before I could distinguish between the blue and red colors.  The last time I remember my friends laughing at me on this account was when my mother gave me some money to buy apples.  She gave me a groschen.  The apples cost only a sechser, and when I gave the woman the groschen, she said, very sadly as it seemed to me, that she had sold nothing the whole livelong day and could not give me back a sechser.  She wished I would buy a groschen’s worth.  Then it occurred to me that I also had a sechser in my pocket, and thoroughly delighted that I had solved the difficult problem, I gave it to the woman and said:  “Now you can give me back a sechser.”  She understood me so little however that she gave me back the groschen and kept the sechser.

At this time, while I was making almost daily visits to the young princes at the castle, both to play as well as to study French with them, another image comes up in my memory.  It was the daughter of the Princess, the Countess Marie.  The mother died shortly after the birth of the child and the Prince subsequently married a second time.  I know not when I saw her for the first time.  She emerges from the darkness of memory slowly and gradually—­at first like an airy shadow which grows more and more distinct as it approaches nearer and nearer, at last standing before my soul like the moon, which on some stormy night throws back the cloud-veils from across its face.  She was always sick and suffering and silent, and I never saw her except reclining upon her couch, upon which two servants brought her into the room and carried her out again, when she was tired.  There she lay in her flowing white drapery, with her hands generally folded.  Her face was so pale and yet so mild, and her eyes so deep and unfathomable, that I often stood before her lost in thought and looked upon her and asked myself if she was not one of the “strange people” also.  Many a time she placed her hand upon my head and then it seemed to me that a thrill ran through all my limbs and that I could not move or speak, but must forever gaze into her deep, unfathomable eyes.  She conversed very little with us, but watched our sports, and when at times we grew very noisy and quarrelsome, she did not complain but held her white hands over her brow and closed her eyes as if sleeping.  But there were days when she said she felt better, and on such days she sat up on her couch, conversed with us and told us curious stories.  I do not know how old she was at that time.  She was so helpless that she seemed like a child, and yet was so serious and silent that she could not have been one.  When people alluded to her they involuntarily spoke gently and softly.  They called her “the angel,” and I never heard anything said of her that was not good and lovely.  Often when I saw her lying so