he fell asleep to the gentle lullaby of ever-flowing water. Other education than this he had not. “His only teachers had been woods and rills; The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.” An aged neighbour, cotemporary with the grandmother, took a great liking to Fritz; and on Sundays, when no work could be done, he was often allowed to go and take dinner or supper there. The old man had traversed nearly all Germany as a peddler, and had come to die in the old homestead near the mill, where he had worked when a boy. He knew by heart all the wild fairy legends of the country, and, in his character of peddler-guest, had acquired a talent for relating them in a manner peculiarly amusing and exciting to children. In the course of his travels, he had likewise collected many things which seemed very remarkable to the inexperienced eye of Fritz; such as curious smoking-pipes and drinking-cups, and images in all the various costumes of Germany. But what most attracted his attention was an ancient clock, brought from Copenhagen when the peddler’s father was a young man. When this clock was in its right mind, it could play twelve tunes, about as simple as “Molly put the kettle on.” But the friction of many years had so worn the cogs of the wheels, that it was frightfully out of tune. This did not trouble the boy’s strong nerves, and he was prodigiously amused with the sputtering, seething, jumping, jabbering sounds it made, when set in motion. To each of the crazy old tunes he gave some droll name. “There goes the Spitting Cat,” he would say; “now let us hear the Old Hen.” Father Rudolph called the rickety old machine his Blacking Box; because he had bought it with the proceeds of a peculiar kind of blacking, of his own manufacture. He was always praising this blacking; and one day he said, “I have never told any one the secret of making it; but if you are a good boy, Fritz, I will show you how it is done.” The child could not otherwise than respect what had procured such a wonderful clock; and when he fell asleep that night, there floated through his mind undefined visions of being able, some time or other, to purchase such a comical machine for himself. This seemed a very unimportant incident of his childhood; but it was the introduction of a thread, that reappeared again in his web of life.