been put away was now openly worn in Eisleben.

The back room, with its robins and green branches, now knew me no
more, but I soon made myself at home with a soap-boiler's family,
to whom the house belonged, and became popular with them on
account of the stories I told them.

I was sent to a private school kept by a man called Weiss, who
left an impression of gravity and dignity upon my mind.

Towards the end of the fifties I was greatly moved at reading in
a musical paper the account of a concert at Eisleben, consisting
of parts of Tannhauser, at which my former master, who had not
forgotten his young pupil, had been present.

The little old town with Luther's house, and the numberless
memorials it contained of his stay there, has often, in later
days, come back to me in dreams. I have always wished to revisit
it and verify the clearness of my recollections, but, strange to
say, it has never been my fate to do so. We lived in the market-
place, where I was often entertained by strange sights, such, for
instance, as performances by a troupe of acrobats, in which a man
walked a rope stretched from tower to tower across the square, an
achievement which long inspired me with a passion for such feats
of daring. Indeed, I got so far as to walk a rope fairly easily
myself with the help of a balancing-pole. I had made the rope out
of cords twisted together and stretched across the courtyard, and
even now I still feel a desire to gratify my acrobatic instincts.
The thing that attracted me most, however, was the brass band of
a Hussar regiment quartered at Eisleben. It often played a