Among the steamer's passengers was a crazy Englishman who was being
taken, under the charge of a keeper, to an insane asylum. While my
mother was asleep the lunatic succeeded in eluding this man's vigilance
and plunged into the river. Of course, there was a tumult on board, and
my mother heard cries of "Fallen into the river!"

"Save!" "He'll drown!" Maternal anxiety instantly applied them to the
child-angler, and she darted up the cabin stairs. I need not describe
the state of mind in which she reached the deck, and her emotion when she
found her nestling in his place, still holding the line in his hand.

As the luckless son of Albion was rescued unharmed, we could look back
upon the incident gaily, but neither of us forgot this anxiety--the first
I was to cause my mother.

I have forgotten everything else that happened on our way home; but when
I think of this first journey, a long one for so young a child, and the
many little trips--usually to Dresden, where my grandmother Ebers lived--
which I was permitted to take, I wonder whether they inspired the love of
travel which moved me so strongly later, or whether it was an inborn
instinct. If a popular superstition is correct, I was predestined to
journey. No less a personage than Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the
kindergarten system, called my attention to it; for when I met him for
the first time in the Institute at Keilhau, he seized my curly hair, bent
my head back, gazed at me with his kind yet penetrating eyes, and said:
"You will wander far through the world, my boy; your teeth are wide
apart."