Franker, gayer, sometimes noisier children than its residents could not
be found in Berlin. I was only a little fellow when we lived there, and
merely tolerated in the "big boys'" sports, but it was a festival when,
with Ludo, I could carry their provisions for them or even help them make
fireworks. The old Rechnungsrath, who lived in the house owned by
Geheimerath Crede, the father of my Leipsic colleague, was their
instructor in this art, which was to prove disastrous to my oldest
brother and bright Paul Seiffart; for--may they pardon me the
treachery--they took one of the fireworks to school, where--I hope
accidentally--it went off. At first this caused much amusement, but
strict judgment followed, and led to my mother's resolution to send her
oldest son away from home to some educational institution.

The well-known teacher, Adolph Diesterweg, whose acquaintance she had
made at the house of a friend, recommended Keilhau, and so our little
band was deprived of the leader to whom Ludo and I had looked up with a
certain degree of reverence on account of his superior strength, his bold
spirit of enterprise, and his kindly condescension to us younger ones.

After his departure the house was much quieter, but we did not forget
him; his letters from Keilhau were read aloud to us, and his descriptions
of the merry school days, the pedestrian tours, and sleigh-rides awakened
an ardent longing in Ludo and myself to follow him.

Yet it was so delightful with my mother, the sun around which our little
lives revolved! I had no thought, performed no act, without wondering
what would be her opinion of it; and this intimate relation, though in an
altered form, continued until her death. In looking backward I may regard
it as a law of my whole development that my conduct was regulated
according to the more or less close mental and outward connection in