On rainy days, our favourite walk was under the arcades, where we wandered up and down, looking in at the shop windows, that seemed to me an Eldorado, with all the treasures they displayed. And never shall I forget my sensations, the day that for the first time I possessed a whole thaler of my own, to spend as I liked! I drove with grandmamma to the Arcade, and we got out there, that I might make my purchase. Now I had long since set my heart on the loveliest little basket, lined with pink silk, which I had often gazed at with longing eyes, thinking it quite an unattainable object. “That costs a gulden,” said the shopkeeper, in answer to my somewhat embarrassed question, for it seemed to me rather an indelicate thing to ask the price of anything, a feeling I have not altogether got over to this day. A gulden! my spirits sank. “Ah! I have only a thaler!” “But that is a great deal too much,” replied the friendly shopman, with whom I was delighted, as in addition to my purchase, he handed me back numberless little coins, with which I at once bought several other charming knicknacks. For I could not tolerate the idea of taking a single pfennig home with me. To have money in one’s pocket seemed to me already then a real misfortune, and I have never changed in that respect. How should one change? Does one not remain the same from the cradle to the grave? And what a number of pretty little things I had for my money! Some of them I have to this day, for I could not bear to part with them, and brought them with me to Roumania. The year 1856 saw us for the last time all assembled round grandmamma, in the month of February, to celebrate her forty-fifth birthday. I was just twelve years old, but already so familiar with the outward signs of ill-health and sickness, that the change in her appearance at once astonished and even disquieted me. It was the strange bright patch of red on each cheek that struck me especially. Her complexion had always remained brilliant, and her cheeks rosy, but now they were much redder, and seemed to be encircled by a hard line that made the skin around look whiter than ever. I think she had also a little dry hacking cough. It soon became evident that her lungs were attacked, her fits of coughing were accompanied by hemorrhage, and the doctors pronounced her to be in a decline. We saw but little of my mother that spring and summer, as she was constantly in Wiesbaden, the invalid always asking for her, and liking no other nursing so well as hers. Already early in July it was announced that there was no longer any hope, and my mother, whose perpetual dread it was that my naturally impulsive nature should gain more and more the upper hand, counting on the solemn impressions of such a scene to sober me for life, resolved to take me with her to the death-bed.