pale and sorrowful, told us that our dear grandfather was dead.

Children cannot understand the terrible solemnity of death. This is a
gift bestowed by their guardian angels, that no gloomy shadows may darken
the sunny brightness of their souls.

I saw only that cheerful faces were changed to sad ones, that the figures
about us moved silently in sable robes and scarcely noticed us. On the
tables in the nursery, where our holiday garments were made, black
clothes were being cut for us also, and I remember having my mourning
dress fitted. I was pleased because it was a new one. I tried to
manufacture a suit for my Berlin Jack-in-the-box from the scraps that
fell from the dressmaker's table. Nothing amuses a child so much as to
imitate what older people are doing. We were forbidden to laugh, but
after a few days our mother no longer checked our mirth. Of our stay at
Scheveningen I recollect nothing except that the paths in the little
garden of the house we occupied were strewn with shells. We dug a big
hole in the sand on the downs, but I retained no remembrance of the sea
and its majesty, and when I beheld it in later years it seemed as if I
were greeting for the first time the eternal Thalassa which was to become
so dear and familiar to me.

My grandmother, I learned, passed away scarcely a year after the death of
her faithful companion, at the home of her son, a lawyer in The Hague.

Two incidents of the journey back are vividly impressed on my mind. We
went by steamer up the Rhine, and stopped at Ehrenbreitstein to visit old
Frau Mendelssohn, our guardian's mother, at her estate of Horchheim. The
carriage had been sent for us, and on the drive the spirited horses ran
away and would have dashed into the Rhine had not my brother Martin, at