Turning my thoughts backward, it seems to me as if almost too much beauty
and pleasure were crowded together at Christmas, richly provided with
presents as we were besides, for over and above the Christmas fair there
was Kroll's Christmas exhibition, where clever heads and skilful hands
transformed a series of great halls, at one time into the domain of
winter, at another into the kingdom of the fairies. There was nothing to
do but look.

Imagination came to a standstill, for what could it add to these wonders?
Yet the fairyland of which Ludo and I had dreamed was more beautiful and
more real than this palpable magnificence of tin and pasteboard; which
is, perhaps, one reason why the overexcited imagination of a city child
shrinks back and tries to find in reality what a boy brought up in the
quiet of the country can conjure up before his mind himself.

Then, too, there were delightful sights in the Gropius panorama and
Fuchs's confectioner's shop--in the one place entertaining things, in the
other instructive. At the panorama half the world was spread out before
us in splendid pictures, so presented and exhibited as to give the most
vivid impression of reality.

From the letters of our mother's brothers, who were Dutch officials in
Java and Japan, as well as from books of travel which had been read to
us, we had already heard much of the wonders of the Orient; and at the
Gropius panorama the inner call that I had often seemed to hear--"Away!
to the East"--only grew the stronger. It has never been wholly silent
since, but at that time I formed the resolution to sail around the world,
or--probably from reading some book--to be a noble pirate. Nor should I
have been dissatisfied with the fate of Robinson Crusoe. The Christmas
exhibition at Fuchs's, Unter den Linden, was merely entertaining--Berlin