after the great trouble he found in teaching me to read--an art which
came to me with great difficulty. As soon as I could read, therefore, I
was sent to the public village school.

The position in which my father stood to the village schoolmasters, that
is to say, to the Cantor,[5] and to the master of the girls' school, and
his judgment of the value of their respective teaching, decided him to
send me to the latter. This choice had a remarkable influence on the
development of my inner nature, on account of the perfect neatness,
quiet, intelligence, and order which reigned in the school; nay, I may
go further, and say the school was exactly suitable for such a child as
I was. In proof of this I will describe my entrance into the school. At
that time church and school generally stood in strict mutual
relationship, and so it was in our case. The school children had their
special places in church; and not only were they obliged to attend
church, but each child had to repeat to the teacher, at a special class
held for the purpose every Monday, some passage of Scripture used by the
minister in his sermon of the day before, as a proof of attention to the
service. From these passages that one which seemed most suitable to
children was then chosen for the little ones to master or to learn by
heart, and for that purpose one of the bigger children had during the
whole week, at certain times each day, to repeat the passage to the
little children, sentence by sentence. The little ones, all standing up,
had then to repeat the text sentence by sentence in like manner, until
it was thoroughly imprinted on their memories.

I came into school on a Monday. The passage chosen for that week was,
"Seek ye first the kingdom of God." I heard these words every day in the
calm, serious, somewhat sing-song voices of the children, sometimes
repeated by one child, sometimes by the whole number. And the text made