Before the year was over, my father’s mother was also dead. But I had never known her,--her mind had been affected for many years, and none of us ever saw her. So that I could not mourn for her, as for the grandmamma I had known and loved, and it was to the latter my thoughts flew back once more, as I knelt beside the coffin of her who had once ruled, as wife and mother, in the home to which she now only returned for her last long slumber. It was for her I wept again, rather than for this unknown grandmother, sorrow for whom was also somewhat crushed by the funeral pomp and ceremony. It left me merely a little sadder and more thoughtful than before, as having had yet another lesson in the vanity of all earthly things. CHAPTER III ERNST MORITZ ARNDT A more fiery soul than that of Ernst Moritz Arndt can surely never have lived upon this earth. He must have been fully eighty years old at the time when I knew him, but age seemed to count for nothing with him. His eye was as bright, his voice as clear and ringing, his gait as quick and elastic as had he still been in the prime of life, and the most impassioned speech from youthful lips would have seemed tame and cold beside the lava-flood of eloquence that poured forth inexhaustibly from his kindly and expressive, although perfectly toothless mouth. The loss of his teeth was indeed the only real sign of age Arndt bore on his person, and it was apparently a matter of so little moment to him, that I have often wondered since, whether our modern practice of repairing by artificial means the ravages of time, be after all so unquestionable an advantage as some would pretend. The mouth which nature alone has moulded year by year seems to me to retain in any case much more character and expression than that which has been fitted out and shaped anew by the dentist’s skill. However that may be, it is certain that Arndt at all events felt not in the least inconvenienced by the loss, nor did it detract from our pleasure in listening to him.