A third master, the archdeacon Langethal, was one of the founders of the
institution, but had left it several years before.

As I mention him with the same warmth that I speak of Middendorf and
Barop, many readers will suspect that this portion of my reminiscences
contains a receipt for favours, and that reverence and gratitude, nay,
perhaps the fear of injuring an institution still existing, induces me to
show only the lights and cover the shadows with the mantle of love.

I will not deny that a boy from eleven to fifteen years readily overlooks
in those who occupy an almost paternal relation to him faults which would
be immediately noted by the unclouded eyes of a critical observer; but I
consider myself justified in describing what I saw in my youth exactly as
it impressed itself on my memory. I have never perceived the smallest
flaw or even a trait or act worthy of censure in either Barop,
Middendorf, or Langethal. Finally, I may say that, after having learned
in later years from abundant data willingly placed at my disposal by
Johannes Barop, our teacher's son and the present master of the
institute, the most minute details concerning their character and work,
none of these images have sustained any material injury.

In Friedrich Froebel, the real founder of the institute, who repeatedly
lived among us for months, I have learned to know from his own works and
the comprehensive amount of literature devoted to him, a really talented
idealist, who on the one hand cannot be absolved from an amazing contempt
for or indifference to the material demands of life, and on the other
possessed a certain artless selfishness which gave him courage, whenever
he wished to promote objects undoubtedly pure and noble, to deal
arbitrarily with other lives, even where it could hardly redound to their
advantage. I shall have more to say of him later.