We knew that it was a pleasure to her to see us at her table on that day, and, up to the last years of her life, all whose vocations permitted met at her house on the anniversary.

She went to church on Sunday, and on Good Friday she insisted that my sisters as well as her self should wear black, not only during the service, but throughout the rest of the day.

Few children enjoyed a more beautiful Christmas than ours, for under the tree adorned with special love each found the desire of his or her heart gratified, while behind the family gift-table there always stood another, on which several poorer people whom I might call “clients” of the household, discovered presents which suited their needs.  Among them, up to the time I went as a boy of eleven to Keilhau, I never failed to see my oldest sister’s nurse with her worthy husband, the shoemaker Grossman, and their well-behaved children.  She gladly permitted us to share in the distribution of the alms liberally bestowed on the needy.  The seeming paradox, “No one ever grew poor by giving,” I first heard from her lips, and she more than once found an opportunity to repeat it.

We, however, never valued her gifts of money so highly as the trouble and inconveniences she cheerfully encountered to aid or add to the happiness of others by means of the numerous relations formed in her social life and the influence gained mainly by her own gracious nature.  Many who are now occupying influential positions owe their first start or have had the path smoothed for them by her kindness.

As in many Berlin families, the Christmas Man came to us—­an old man disguised by a big beard and provided with a bag filled with nuts and bonbons and sometimes trifling gifts.  He addressed us in a feigned voice, saying that the Christ Child had sent him, but the dainties he had were intended only for the good children who could recite some thing for him.  Of course, provision for doing this had been made.  Everybody pressed forward, but the Christmas Man kept order, and only when each had repeated a little verse did he open the bag and distribute its contents among us.

Usually the Christmas Man brought a companion, who followed him in the guise of Knecht Ruprecht with his own bag of presents, and mingled with his jests threats against naughty children.

The carp served on Christmas eve in every Berlin family, after the distribution of gifts, and which were never absent from my mother’s table, I have always had on my own in Jena, Leipsic, and Munich, or wherever the evening of December 24th might find us.  On the whole, we remain faithful to the Christmas customs of my own home, which vary little from those of the Germans in Riga, where my wife’s family belong; nay, it is so hard for me to relinquish such childish habits, that, when unable to procure a Christmas tree for the two “Eves” I spent on the Nile, I decked a young palm and fastened candles on it.