“I will give you as an example the life and conduct of my father, of whom you have not heard very much, for he died before you were born, but whose mind and likeness are reproduced in you only among all your brothers and sisters.  The disastrous fire which reduced his native town to ashes destroyed his fortune and that of his relatives; grief at having lost everything—­for the fire broke out in the next house to his—­cost his father his life; and while his mother, who for six years had been stretched an a bed of pain, where horrible convulsions held her fast, supported her three little girls by the needlework that she did in the intervals of suffering, he went as a mere clerk into one of the leading mercantile houses of Augsburg, where his lively and yet even temper made him welcome; there he learned a calling, for which, however, he was not naturally adapted, and came back to the home of his birth with a pure and stainless heart, in order to be the support of his mother and his sisters.

“A man can do much when he wishes to do much:  join your efforts to my prayers, and leave the rest in the hands of God.”

The prediction of this Puritan woman was fulfilled:  a little time afterwards rector Salfranck was appointed professor at Richembourg, whither Sand followed him; it was there that the events of 1813 found him.  In the month of March he wrote to his mother:—­

“I can scarcely, dear mother, express to you how calm and happy I begin to feel since I am permitted to believe in the enfranchisement of my country, of which I hear on every side as being so near at hand,—­of that country which, in my faith in God, I see beforehand free and mighty, that country for whose happiness I would undergo the greatest sufferings, and even death.  Take strength for this crisis.  If by chance it should reach our good province, lift your eyes to the Almighty, then carry them back to beautiful rich nature.  The goodness of God which preserved and protected so many men during the disastrous Thirty Years’ War can do and will do now what it could and did then.  As for me, I believe and hope.”

Leipzig came to justify Sand’s presentiments; then the year 1814 arrived, and he thought Germany free.

On the 10th of December in the same year he left Richembourg with this certificate from his master:—­

“Karl Sand belongs to the small number of those elect young men who are distinguished at once by the gifts of the mind and the faculties of the soul; in application and work he surpasses all his fellow-students, and this fact explains his rapid progress in all the philosophical and philological sciences; in mathematics only there are still some further studies which he might pursue.  The most affectionate wishes of his teacher follow him on his departure.

“J.  A. KEYN, “Rector, and master of the first class.  “Richembourg, Sept. 15, 1814”

But it was really the parents of Sand, and in particular his mother, who had prepared the fertile soil in which his teachers had sowed the seeds of learning; Sand knew this well, for at the moment of setting out for the university of Tubingen, where he was about to complete the theological studies necessary for becoming a pastor, as he desired to do, he wrote to them:—­