his way slowly and laboriously from the ranks upward, been seven times
wounded and twice promoted on the field, he was made colonel of his
regiment in 1814, when the Allies entered Paris. In 1819, being no longer
fit for active service, he retired on a pension, and was appointed King's
steward of the Chateau of Augustenburg at Bruehl--a sort of military
curatorship to which few duties and certain contingent emoluments were
attached. Of these last, a suite of rooms in the Chateau, a couple of acres
of private garden, and the revenue accruing from a small local impost,
formed the most important part. It was towards the latter half of this year
(1819) that, having now for the first time in his life a settled home in
which to receive me, my father fetched me from Nuremberg where I was living
with my aunt, Martha Baur, and took me to reside with him at Bruehl.

Now my aunt, Martha Baur, was an exemplary person in her way; a rigid
Lutheran, a strict disciplinarian, and the widow of a wealthy wool-stapler.
She lived in a gloomy old house near the Frauen-Kirche, where she received
no society, and led a life as varied and lively on the whole as that of a
Trappist. Every Wednesday afternoon we paid a visit to the grave of her
"blessed man" in the Protestant cemetery outside the walls, and on Sundays
we went three times to church. These were the only breaks in the long
monotony of our daily life. On market-days we never went out of doors at
all; and when the great annual fair-time came round, we drew down all the
front blinds and inhabited the rooms at the back.

As for the pleasures of childhood, I cannot say that I knew many of them in
those old Nuremberg days. Still I was not unhappy, nor even very dull. It
may be that, knowing nothing pleasanter, I was not even conscious of the
dreariness of the atmosphere I breathed. There was, at all events, a big
old-fashioned garden full of vegetables and cottage-flowers, at the back
of the house, in which I almost lived in Spring and Summer-time, and from