While speaking, he pointed up the stream and briefly described its course.

We assented.

We had passed the village of Schaale.  The one before us, with the church, was called Eichfeld, and at our right was another which we could not see, Lichtstadt.  In ancient times, he told us, the mountain sides and the bottom of the whole valley had been clothed with dense oak forests.  Then people came who wanted to till the ground.  They began to clear (lichten) these woods at Lichtstadt.  This was a difficult task, and they had used axes (Keile) for the purpose.  At Eichfeld they felled the oaks (Fiche), and carried the trunks to Schaale, where the bark (Schale) was stripped off to make tan for the tanners on the Saale.  So the name of Lichtstadt came from the clearing of the forests, Eichfeld from the felling of the oaks, Schaale from stripping off the bark, and Keilhau from the hewing with axes.

This simple tale of ancient times had sprung from the Thuringian soil, so rich in legends, and, little as it might satisfy the etymologist, it delighted me.  I believed it, and when afterward I looked down from a height into the valley and saw the Saale, my imagination clothed the bare or pineclad mountain slopes with huge oak forests, and beheld the giant forms of the ancient Thuringians felling the trees with their heavy axes.

The idea of violence which seemed to be connected with the name of Keilhau had suddenly disappeared.  It had gained meaning to me, and Herr Middendorf had given us an excellent proof of a fundamental requirement of Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the institution:  “The external must be spiritualized and given an inner significance.”

The same talented pedagogue had said, “Our education associates instruction with the external world which surrounds the human being as child and youth”; and Middendorf carried out this precept when, at the first meeting, he questioned us about the trees and bushes by the wayside, and when we were obliged to confess our ignorance of most of them, he mentioned their names and described their peculiarities.

At last we reached the Keilhau plain, a bowl whose walls formed tolerably high mountains which surrounded it on all sides except toward Rudolstadt, where an opening permitted the Schaalbach to wind through meadows and fields.  So the village lies like an egg in a nest open in one direction, like the beetle in the calyx of a flower which has lost one of its leaves.  Nature has girded it on three sides with protecting walls which keep the wind from entering the valley, and to this, and the delicious, crystal-clear water which flows from the mountains into the pumps, its surprising healthfulness is doubtless due.  During my residence there of four and a half years there was no epidemic disease among the boys, and on the fiftieth jubilee of the institute, in 1867, which I attended, the statement was made that during the half century of its existence only one pupil had died, and he had had heart disease when his parents sent him to the school.