which I managed to extract a great deal of enjoyment; while for companions
and playmates I had old Karl, my aunt's gardener, a pigeon-house full of
pigeons, three staid elderly cats, and a tortoise. In the way of education
I fared scantily enough, learning just as little as it pleased my aunt to
teach me, and having that little presented to me under its driest and most
unattractive aspect.

Such was my life till I went away with my father in the Autumn of 1819. I
was then between nine and ten years of age--having lost my mother in
earliest infancy, and lived with aunt Martha Baur ever since I could
remember.

The change from Nuremberg to Bruehl was for me like the transition from
Purgatory to Paradise. I enjoyed for the first time all the delights of
liberty. I had no lessons to learn; no stern aunt to obey; but, which was
infinitely pleasanter, a kind-hearted Rhenish Maedchen, with a silver arrow
in her hair, to wait upon me; and an indulgent father whose only orders
were that I should be allowed to have my own way in everything.

And my way was to revel in the air and the sunshine; to roam about the park
and pleasure-grounds; to watch the soldiers at drill, and hear the band
play every day, and wander at will about the deserted state-apartments of
the great empty Chateau.

Looking back upon it from this distance of time, I should pronounce the
Electoral Residenz at Bruehl to be a miracle of bad taste; but not Aladdin's
palace if planted amid the gardens of Armida could then have seemed
lovelier in my eyes. The building, a heavy many-windowed pile in the worst
style of the worst Renaissance period, stood, and still stands, in a fat,
flat country about ten miles from Cologne, to which city it bears much the