To us children who had seen no larger city, but had visited many small villages in the neighbourhood, Mannheim seemed quite an important town. It was at the point where the Neckar flows into the Rhine, and as this river flowed through the Odenwald, it constantly brought big loads of lumber and also many bushels of grain to Mannheim, which had become a distributing centre for various cereals and lumber, and was also a great tobacco centre. My father had cigar factories at Mannheim and also in Lorsch and Heppenheim and sometimes employed as many as a thousand hands. Nevertheless, the entire population of Mannheim was scarcely 21,000, and the thoughts of most of its inhabitants were bent on the sober concerns of their every-day struggles and on raising their large families, without ambition for great riches or hope of higher place. None but the nobles dreamed of such grandeur as a carriage and pair; the successful tradesman only occasionally gratified a modest love of display or travel by hiring a barouche for a drive through the hop fields and tobacco patches surrounding the city to one of the near-by villages. Those whose mental powers were of a superior order exercised them in a keen appreciation of poetry, music, and the drama; Schiller and Goethe were their demi-gods, Mozart and Beethoven their companions of the spirit. The Grand Duke’s fatherly devotion to his subjects’ welfare had won him their filial affection; with political matters they concerned themselves almost not at all. My childhood recollections reflect the quiet colours of this atmosphere. My father was prosperous, and our home was blessed by the comforts and little elegancies that his means made possible; it shared in the artistic interests of the community by virtue both of his interest in the theatre and my mother’s passion for the best in literature and music. I was the ninth of eleven living children, and I recall the visits of the music teachers who gave my sisters lessons on the piano and taught my eldest brother to play the violin. We children learned by heart the poems of Goethe and Schiller and shared the pride of all Mannheimers that the latter poet had once lived in our city and that his play, “The Robbers,” was first produced at our Stadt Theatre. Those who like to reflect upon the smallness of the world will find it amusing to read that among the various friends of my family were quite a few with whom we are now on the most cordial relations in New York. Our physician was Dr. Gutherz, one of whose daughters married my neighbour, Nathan Straus. Their son and mine are intimate friends, and, in turn, their sons, Nathan 3d and Henry 3d, are now playmates in Central Park.