In the twilight hours the boy listened to stories of the “French Times,” when the great Napoleon passed through the land with his mighty army before the Russian campaign, and later returned, his army shattered and defeated. He heard of the Cossacks, uncouth, dirty, bearded men on shaggy ponies, who followed Napoleon’s retreating army, and how they stole and plundered and ate the tallow candles in people’s houses. And he heard, too, of the great men whose fame was not created by the sword—Schiller, Goethe Tasso, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Rousseau. Perhaps the stories of these famous men of history inspired the boy in later years to become himself a leader among men. When he was still very young, Carl was sent to school; and twice a week he walked, each way, to a town four miles distant, to study music. It was during these early days that Carl first heard his family talk about the United States, “that young Republic where the people were free, without kings, without counts”; and it is probable that the impressions of this republican state of free citizens received in his early years had something to do with the directing of his ambitions in later life. When Carl was nine years old his father, believing that the boy had outgrown the little school at Liblar, sent him to a school at Brühl, where he continued his various lessons and the study of music. The next year Carl was taken by his father to Cologne and entered the “gymnasium,” a school which bears some resemblance to the high school in the United States. Here he studied history, Latin, and German, and particularly the art of expressing himself in writing with clearness and ease—a study which perhaps contributed most to his success in coming years. But now a new influence began to enter the life of the boy. During the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, that part of Germany which extends along the banks of the Rhine had seen three governments. First, it had been ruled by the Archbishop Electors; then it was conquered by the French and had felt French rule both under the French Republic and the Empire; and last of all, it had been taken from the French and annexed by Prussia. The Rhenish people perhaps liked the Prussian rule least of all; for the Prussians governed well, but with a stern discipline that could never be understood by the careless, pleasure-loving people of the Rhine.