Among the steamer’s passengers was a crazy Englishman who was being taken, under the charge of a keeper, to an insane asylum.  While my mother was asleep the lunatic succeeded in eluding this man’s vigilance and plunged into the river.  Of course, there was a tumult on board, and my mother heard cries of “Fallen into the river!”

“Save!” “He’ll drown!” Maternal anxiety instantly applied them to the child-angler, and she darted up the cabin stairs.  I need not describe the state of mind in which she reached the deck, and her emotion when she found her nestling in his place, still holding the line in his hand.

As the luckless son of Albion was rescued unharmed, we could look back upon the incident gaily, but neither of us forgot this anxiety—­the first I was to cause my mother.

I have forgotten everything else that happened on our way home; but when I think of this first journey, a long one for so young a child, and the many little trips—­usually to Dresden, where my grandmother Ebers lived—­ which I was permitted to take, I wonder whether they inspired the love of travel which moved me so strongly later, or whether it was an inborn instinct.  If a popular superstition is correct, I was predestined to journey.  No less a personage than Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten system, called my attention to it; for when I met him for the first time in the Institute at Keilhau, he seized my curly hair, bent my head back, gazed at me with his kind yet penetrating eyes, and said:  “You will wander far through the world, my boy; your teeth are wide apart.”

CHAPTER V.

Lennestrasse.—­Lenne.—­Early impressions.

Lennestrasse is the scene of the period of my life which began with my return from Holland.  If, coming from the Brandenburg Gate, you follow the Thiergarten and pass the superb statue of Goethe, you will reach a corner formed by two blocks of houses.  The one on the left, opposite to the city wall, now called Koniggratz, was then known as Schulgartenstrasse.  The other, on the right, whose windows overlooked the Thiergarten, bore the name in my childhood of Lennestrasse, which it owed to Lenne, the park superintendent, a man of great talent, but who lives in my memory only as a particularly jovial old gentleman.  He occupied No. 1, and was one of my mother’s friends.  Next to Prince Packler, he may certainly be regarded as one of the most inventive and tasteful landscape gardeners of his time.  He transformed the gardens of Sans-Souci and the Pfaueninsel at Potsdam, and laid out the magnificent park on Babelsberg for Emperor William I, when he was only “Prince of Prussia.”  The magnificent Zoological Garden in Berlin is also his work; but he prided himself most on rendering the Thiergarten a “lung” for the people, and, spite of many obstacles, materially enlarging it.  Every moment of the tireless man’s time was claimed, and besides King Frederick William IV, who himself uttered many a tolerably good joke, found much pleasure in the society of the gay, clever Rhinelander, whom he often summoned to dine with him at Potsdam.  Lenne undoubtedly appreciated this honour, yet I remember the doleful tone in which he sometimes greeted my mother with, “Called to court again!”