When Fritz was two years old the family moved to Joditz, another
village of the Fichtelgebirge. Of his boyhood here Jean Paul in his
last years set down some mellowed recollections. He tells how his
father, still in his dressing gown, used to take him and his brother
Adam across the Saale to dig potatoes and gather nuts, alternating in
the labor and the play; how his thrifty mother would send him with the
provision bag to her own mother's at Hof, who would give him goodies
that he would share with some little friend. He tells, too, of his
rapture at his first A B C book and its gilded cover, and of his
eagerness at school, until his too-anxious father took him from
contact with the rough peasant boys and tried to educate him himself,
an experience not without value, at least as a warning, to the future
author of _Levana_. But if the Richters were proud, they were very
poor. The boys used to count it a privilege to carry the father's
coffee-cup to him of a Sunday morning, as he sat by the window
meditating his sermon, for then they could carry it back again "and
pick the unmelted remains of sugar-candy from the bottom of it."
Simple pleasures surely, but, as Carlyle says, "there was a bold,
deep, joyful spirit looking through those young eyes, and to such a
spirit the world has nothing poor, but all is rich and full of
loveliness and wonder."

Every book that the boy Fritz could anywise come at was, he tells us,
"a fresh green spring-place," where "rootlets, thirsty for knowledge
pressed and twisted in every direction to seize and absorb." Very
characteristic of the later Jean Paul is one incident of his childhood
which, he says, made him doubt whether he had not been born rather for
philosophy than for imaginative writing. He was witness to the birth
of his own self-consciousness.