Between my young Scotch friend, my mother, Nikola, and my professors in the Physical Institute, I soon forgot the unpleasant memories of the Teutonism in Prague, and Berlin no longer looked to me like a Thraenenthal, a valley of tears, as my old friend Bilharz in Cortlandt Street would have called it. I soon found myself enjoying warm personal friendships of German fellow students and of the professors, and it was a very fortunate thing; it was providential. Nothing but the love of God and the friendship of man can give that spiritual power which one needs in moments of great sorrow. One day in the beginning of winter, of that year, a letter arrived from my sister, telling me that my saintly mother was no longer among the living. I vowed on that day that her blessed memory should be perpetuated as far as an humble mortal like myself could do it. Twenty-seven years later the Serbian Academy of Sciences announced that the income of a foundation in memory of Olympiada Pupin would be expended annually to assist a goodly number of poor schoolboys in Old Serbia and Macedonia. The vanishing of a life which is an essential part of one’s own life produces a mysterious shift of the direction of one’s mental and spiritual vision. Instead of searching for light which will illuminate the meaning of things in the external physical world, as the vision of young people usually does, it begins to search for light which will illuminate the meaning of what is going on in the internal world, the spiritual world of our soul. The question “What is Light?” was no longer the most important question of my thoughts after my mother’s death. The question “What is Life?” dominated for a long time my thoughts and feelings. I became introspective, and, being a somewhat temperamental person, like most Slavs, I might have lost my way forever in the labyrinth of all sorts of metaphysical structures of my own creation. Providence came to my rescue. Two American students with aspirations in science similar to mine joined the Physical Institute. One of them, a Harvard graduate, the late Arthur Gordon Webster, was the very distinguished professor of physics at Clark University; the other, a Johns Hopkins man, Joseph Sweetman Ames, is now the director of the physical laboratory at Johns Hopkins and a worthy successor to the famous Henry Augustus Rowland. Their truly American enthusiasm and directness prevented me from relapsing into the drowsy indefiniteness, sometimes called idealism, of a temperamental and sentimental Slav. They told me many wonderful tales of the higher endeavor in science at Harvard and at Johns Hopkins. The new Jefferson Physical Laboratory at Harvard was a wonder, according to Webster; and Ames never grew weary of extolling the beauties of Rowland’s wonderful researches in solar spectra, and I never grew weary of listening to them. At times, however, I wondered why these two men had ever come to Helmholtz when they were so well off at home.