Among such associations the first ten years of my life were passed. We studied hard, but we played hard, too. Nor were our muscles forgotten: we were given regular exercises, and great was my pride when I passed the “swimming test” one summer’s day, by holding my own for the prescribed half hour against the Rhine current and so winning the right to wear the magic letters R. S.--“Rhine-Swimmer”--on my bathing suit. Life was indeed gemütlich in the Mannheim of that period. It was not long, however, before the faraway world of America began to knock at our quiet door. A brother of my father had joined the gold rush to the Pacific and settled in San Francisco; he wrote us tales of the wild, free life of California, its adventures and its wealth. Strange gifts came back from him--a cane for the Grand Duke, its head a piece of gold-bearing quartz; for us children queer mementoes of an existence that seemed all romance. From time to time, this “Gold-Uncle,” as we called him, gave American friends touring Europe letters of introduction to my father, and these visitors enhanced the charm of the United States. One such especially filled our minds with narratives of easily won riches; Captain Richardson, a bearded Forty-niner, whose accounts of the land of opportunity were so much more moving than our fairy tales as to affect even my father’s mature fancy. For my father heard them at a moment when, by an odd coincidence, an act of the American Congress had caused him great damage. In 1862 a tariff had been enacted by the United States which greatly increased the duty on cigars. For many years the largest part of his production had been exported to the United States. Father had a representative in New York, and his brother in San Francisco attended to the distribution on the Pacific Coast--they both had urged him to rush over all the cigars he could and land them before the law should go into effect. Unfortunately, the slow freighter that carried the last and biggest shipment arrived one day too late. Had she docked in time, my life might have been spent differently. That day’s delay meant the difference between profit and disaster to my father; the cigars, which, when duty free, would have yielded him a good return, were a dead loss when to their cost was added the burden of the new tariff charges. These changes in any event would have compelled him to seek a new market, as they closed America forever to goods of the cheap grade of German tobacco. That might have been arranged, but when the necessity to seek new fields was coupled with the crushing loss sustained upon this shipment, his finances were so weakened that he realized he would have to start afresh and on a smaller scale.