The founders of the Keilhau institute, and A glimpse at the history of the school.

I was well acquainted with the three founders of our institute—­Fredrich Froebel, Middendorf, and Langethal—­and the two latter were my teachers.  Froebel was decidedly “the master who planned it.”

When we came to Keilhau he was already sixty-six years old, a man of lofty stature, with a face which seemed to be carved with a dull knife out of brown wood.

His long nose, strong chin, and large ears, behind which the long locks, parted in the middle, were smoothly brushed, would have rendered him positively ugly, had not his “Come, let us live for our children,” beamed so invitingly in his clear eyes.  People did not think whether he was handsome or not; his features bore the impress of his intellectual power so distinctly that the first glance revealed the presence of a remarkable man.

Yet I must confess—­and his portrait agrees with my memory—­that his face by no means suggested the idealist and man of feeling; it seemed rather expressive of shrewdness, and to have been lined and worn by severe conflicts concerning the most diverse interests.  But his voice and his glance were unusually winning, and his power over the heart of the child was limitless.  A few words were sufficient to win completely the shyest boy whom he desired to attract; and thus it happened that, even when he had been with us only a few weeks, he was never seen crossing the court-yard without a group of the younger pupils hanging to his coattails and clasping his hands and arms.

Usually they were persuading him to tell stories, and when he condescended to do so, older ones flocked around him too, and they were never disappointed.  What fire, what animation the old man had retained!  We never called him anything but “Oheim.”  The word “Onkel” he detested as foreign, because it was derived from “avunculus” and “oncle.”  With the high appreciation he had of “Tante”—­whom he termed, next to the mother, the most important factor of education in the family—­our “Oheim” was probably specially agreeable to him.

He was thoroughly a self-made man.  The son of a pastor in Oberweissbach, in Thuringia, he had had a dreary childhood; for his mother died young, and he soon had a step-mother, who treated him with the utmost tenderness until her own children were born.  Then an indescribably sad time began for the neglected boy, whose dreamy temperament vexed even his own father.  Yet in this solitude his love for Nature awoke.  He studied plants, animals, minerals; and while his young heart vainly longed for love, he would have gladly displayed affection himself, if his timidity would have permitted him to do so.  His family, seeing him prefer to dissect the bones of some animal rather than to talk with his parents, probably considered him a very unlovable child when they sent him, in his tenth year, to school in the city of Ilm.