more vehemently if they did not more clearly explain themselves.  Thereupon they brought forward an old story, which they pretended to have overheard from their parents, that my father was the son of some eminent man, while that good citizen had shown himself willing to take outwardly the paternal office.  They had the impudence to produce all sorts of arguments:  as, for example, that our property came exclusively from our grandmother; that the other collateral relations who lived in Friedburg and other places were alike destitute of property; and other reasons of the sort, which could merely derive their weight from malice.  I listened to them more composedly than they expected, for they stood ready to fly the very moment that I should make a gesture as if I would seize their hair.  But I replied quite calmly, and in substance, “that even this was no great injury to me.  Life was such a boon, that one might be quite indifferent as to whom one had to thank for it; since at least it must be derived from God, before whom we all were equals.”  As they could make nothing of it, they let the matter drop for this time:  we went on playing together as before, which among children is an approved mode of reconciliation.

Still, these spiteful words inoculated me with a sort of moral disease, which crept on in secret.  It would not have displeased me at all to have been the grandson of any person of consideration, even if it had not been in the most lawful way.  My acuteness followed up the scent, my imagination was excited, and my sagacity put in requisition.  I began to investigate the allegation, and invented or found for it new grounds of probability.  I had heard little said of my grandfather, except that his likeness, together with my grandmother’s, had hung in a parlor of the old house; both of which, after the building of the new one, had been kept in an upper chamber.  My grandmother must have been a very handsome woman, and of the same age as her husband.  I remembered also to have seen in her room the miniature of a handsome gentleman in uniform, with star and order, which after her death, and during the confusion of house-building, had disappeared, with many other small pieces of furniture.  These and many other things I put together in my childish head, and exercised that modern poetical talent which contrives to obtain the sympathies of the whole cultivated world by a marvellous combination of the important events of human life.

But as I did not venture to trust such an affair to any one, or even to ask the most remote questions concerning it, I was not wanting in a secret diligence, in order to get, if possible, somewhat nearer to the matter.  I had heard it explicitly maintained, that sons often bore a decided resemblance to their fathers or grandfathers.  Many of our friends, especially Councillor Schneider, a friend of the family, were connected by business with all the princes and noblemen of the neighborhood, of whom, including both the ruling and the younger branches, not a few had estates on the Rhine and Main, and in the intermediate country, and who at times honored their faithful agents with their portraits.