Then the day which had been dreaded came.  Wherever we looked the women were weeping and the eyes of the men were reddened by tears.  My mother, pale and sorrowful, told us that our dear grandfather was dead.

Children cannot understand the terrible solemnity of death.  This is a gift bestowed by their guardian angels, that no gloomy shadows may darken the sunny brightness of their souls.

I saw only that cheerful faces were changed to sad ones, that the figures about us moved silently in sable robes and scarcely noticed us.  On the tables in the nursery, where our holiday garments were made, black clothes were being cut for us also, and I remember having my mourning dress fitted.  I was pleased because it was a new one.  I tried to manufacture a suit for my Berlin Jack-in-the-box from the scraps that fell from the dressmaker’s table.  Nothing amuses a child so much as to imitate what older people are doing.  We were forbidden to laugh, but after a few days our mother no longer checked our mirth.  Of our stay at Scheveningen I recollect nothing except that the paths in the little garden of the house we occupied were strewn with shells.  We dug a big hole in the sand on the downs, but I retained no remembrance of the sea and its majesty, and when I beheld it in later years it seemed as if I were greeting for the first time the eternal Thalassa which was to become so dear and familiar to me.

My grandmother, I learned, passed away scarcely a year after the death of her faithful companion, at the home of her son, a lawyer in The Hague.

Two incidents of the journey back are vividly impressed on my mind.  We went by steamer up the Rhine, and stopped at Ehrenbreitstein to visit old Frau Mendelssohn, our guardian’s mother, at her estate of Horchheim.  The carriage had been sent for us, and on the drive the spirited horses ran away and would have dashed into the Rhine had not my brother Martin, at that time eleven years old, who was sitting on the box by the coachman, saved us.

The other incident is of a less serious nature.  I had seen many a salmon in the kitchen, and resolved to fish for one from the steamer; so I tied a bit of candy to a string and dropped it from the deck.  The fish were so wanting in taste as to disdain the sweet bait, but my early awakened love of sport kept me patiently a long time in the same spot, which was undoubtedly more agreeable to my mother than the bait was to the salmon.  As, protected by the guards, and probably watched by the governess and my brothers and sisters, I devoted myself to this amusement, my mother went down into the cabin to rest.  Suddenly there was a loud uproar on the ship.  People shouted and screamed, everybody rushed on deck and looked into the river.  Whether I, too, heard the fall and saw the life-boat manned I don’t remember; but I recollect all the more clearly my mother’s rushing frantically from the cabin and clasping me tenderly to her heart as her rescued child.  So the drama ended happily, but there had been a terrible scene.