The Prussian nation first obtained in 1848 the liberties which had been secured at an earlier date by the other German states, and nothing gives me more cause for gratitude than the boon of being permitted to see the realization and fulfilment of the dream of so many former generations, and my dismembered native land united into one grand, beautiful whole.  I deem it a great happiness to have been a contemporary of Emperor William I, Bismarck, and Von Moltke, witnessed their great deeds as a man of mature years, and shared the enthusiasm they evoked and which enabled these men to make our German Fatherland the powerful, united empire it is to-day.

The journey to Holland closes the first part of my childhood.  I look back upon it as a beautiful, unshadowed dream out of doors or in a pleasant house where everybody loved me.  But I could not single out the years, months, or days of this retrospect.  It is only a smooth stream which bears us easily along.  There is no series of events, only disconnected images—­a faithful dog, a picture on the wall, above all the love and caresses of the mother lavished specially on me as the youngest, and the most blissful of all sounds in the life of a German child, the ringing of the little bell announcing that the Christmas tree is ready.

Only in after days, when the world of fairyland and legend is left behind, does the child have any idea of consecutive events and human destinies.  The stories told by mother and grandmother about Snow-White, the Sleeping Beauty, the giants and the dwarfs, Cinderella, the stable at Bethlehem where the Christ-Child lay in the manger beside the oxen and asses, the angels who appeared to the shepherds singing “Glory to God in the Highest,” the three kings and the star which led them to the Christ-Child, are firmly impressed on his memory.  I don’t know how young I was when I saw the first picture of the kings in their purple robes kneeling before the babe in its mother’s lap, but its forms and hues were indelibly stamped upon my mental vision, and I never forgot its meaning.  True, I had no special thoughts concerning it; nay, I scarcely wondered to see kings in the dust before a child, and now, when I hear the summons of the purest and noblest of Beings, “Suffer little children to come unto me,” and understand the sacred simplicity of a child’s heart, it no longer awakens surprise.

CHAPTER IV.

The journey to Holland to attend the golden wedding.

The rattle of wheels and the blast of the postilion’s horn closed the first period of my childhood.  When I was four years old we went to my mother’s home to attend my grandparents’ golden wedding.  If I wished to describe the journey in its regular order I should be forced to depend upon the statements of others.  So little of all which grown people deem worth seeing and noting in Belgium, Holland,