How small and pale the child is!  And how eloquently the blue eyes invite a purchaser, for it is only with looks that the wares are extolled!  I still see them both before me!  The threepenny pieces they get are to help their starving mother to heat the attic room in those winter days which, cold though they are, may warm the heart.  Looking at them our mother told us how hunger hurts, and how painful want and misery are to bear, and we never left the Christmas fair without buying a few sheep or a prune man, though all we could do with them was to give them away again.  When I wrote my fairy-tale, The Nuts, I had the Christmas fair at Berlin in my mind’s eye, and I seemed to see the wretched little girl who, among all the happy folk, had found nothing but cold, pain, anguish, and a handful of nuts, and who afterward fared so happily—­not, indeed, among men, but with the most beautiful angels in heaven.

Why are the Berlin children defrauded of this bright and innocent pleasure, and their hearts denied the practice of exercising charity?

Turning my thoughts backward, it seems to me as if almost too much beauty and pleasure were crowded together at Christmas, richly provided with presents as we were besides, for over and above the Christmas fair there was Kroll’s Christmas exhibition, where clever heads and skilful hands transformed a series of great halls, at one time into the domain of winter, at another into the kingdom of the fairies.  There was nothing to do but look.

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.