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."




CHAPTER V.

LENNESTRASSE.--LENNE.--EARLY IMPRESSIONS.

Lennestrasse is the scene of the period of my life which began with my
return from Holland. If, coming from the Brandenburg Gate, you follow the
Thiergarten and pass the superb statue of Goethe, you will reach a corner
formed by two blocks of houses. The one on the left, opposite to the city
wall, now called Koniggratz, was then known as Schulgartenstrasse. The
other, on the right, whose windows overlooked the Thiergarten, bore the