On our "picnics" from Berlin we had taken dainty mugs in order to drink
from the wells; now we learned to seek and find the springs themselves,
and how delicious the crystal fluid tastes from the hollow of the hand,
Diogenes's drinking-cup!

Old Councillor Wellmer, in the Crede House, in Berlin, a zealous
entomologist, owned a large collection of beetles, and had carefully
impaled his pets on long slender pins in neat boxes, which filled
numerous glass cases. They lacked nothing but life. In Keilhau we found
every variety of insect in central Germany, on the bushes and in the
moss, the turf, the bark of trees, or on the flowers and blades of grass,
and they were alive and allowed us to watch them. Instead of neatly
written labels, living lips told us their names.

We had listened to the notes of the birds in the Thiergarten; but our
mother, the tutor, the placards, our nice clothing, prohibited our
following the feathered songsters into the thickets. But in Keilhau we
were allowed to pursue them to their nests. The woods were open to every
one, and nothing could injure our plain jackets and stout boots. Even in
my second year at Keilhau I could distinguish all the notes of the
numerous birds in the Thuringian forests, and, with Ludo, began the
collection of eggs whose increase afforded us so much pleasure. Our
teachers' love for all animate creation had made them impose bounds on
the zeal of the egg-hunters, who were required always to leave one egg in
the nest, and if it contained but one not to molest it. How many trees
we climbed, what steep cliffs we scaled, through what crevices we
squeezed to add a rare egg to our collection; nay, we even risked our
limbs and necks! Life is valued so much less by the young, to whom it is
brightest, and before whom it still stretches in a long vista, than by
the old, for whom its charms are already beginning to fade, and who are