Imagination came to a standstill, for what could it add to these wonders?  Yet the fairyland of which Ludo and I had dreamed was more beautiful and more real than this palpable magnificence of tin and pasteboard; which is, perhaps, one reason why the overexcited imagination of a city child shrinks back and tries to find in reality what a boy brought up in the quiet of the country can conjure up before his mind himself.

Then, too, there were delightful sights in the Gropius panorama and Fuchs’s confectioner’s shop—­in the one place entertaining things, in the other instructive.  At the panorama half the world was spread out before us in splendid pictures, so presented and exhibited as to give the most vivid impression of reality.

From the letters of our mother’s brothers, who were Dutch officials in Java and Japan, as well as from books of travel which had been read to us, we had already heard much of the wonders of the Orient; and at the Gropius panorama the inner call that I had often seemed to hear—­“Away! to the East”—­only grew the stronger.  It has never been wholly silent since, but at that time I formed the resolution to sail around the world, or—­probably from reading some book—­to be a noble pirate.  Nor should I have been dissatisfied with the fate of Robinson Crusoe.  The Christmas exhibition at Fuchs’s, Unter den Linden, was merely entertaining—­Berlin jokes in pictures mainly of a political or satirical order.  Most distinctly of all I remember the sentimental lady of rank who orders her servant to catch a fly on a tea-tray and put it carefully out of the window.  The obedient Thomas gets hold of the insect, takes it to the window, and with the remark, “Your ladyship, it is pouring, the poor thing might take cold,” brings it back again to the tea-tray.

There was plenty of such entertainment in winter, and we had our part in much of it.  Rellstab, the well-known editor of Voss’s journal, made a clever collection of such jokes in his Christmas Wanderings.  We could read, and whatever was offered by that literary St. Nicholas and highly respected musical critic for cultivated Berlin our mother was quite willing we should enjoy.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

On the 18th of March, the day of the fighting in the streets of Berlin, we had been living for a year in the large suite of apartments at No. 7 Linkstrasse.

Of those who inhabited the same house with us I remember only the sculptor Streichenberg, whose studio was next to our pretty garden, and the Beyers, a married couple.  He, later a general and commander of the troops besieging Strasburg in 1870, was at that time a first lieutenant.  She was a refined, extremely amiable, and very musical woman, who had met our mother before, and now entered into the friendliest relations with her.