Bernays was not merely well-read in the Jewish Scriptures, but seemed to know the New Testament also better than we did ourselves, and his ideas on religious topics were always striking and impressive. I did not then know of his intimate friendship with Ernest Renan, and of the correspondence they kept up. I was indeed at this time considered much too young to be admitted even as a listener to the long and serious conversations--of such absorbing interest to both my parents--that took place between them and Bernays. The latter, I have since heard, felt it a great hardship that he should be excluded, on account of his nationality, from holding a professorship at the University, and this in spite of his being in his own line probably the finest scholar Bonn has ever produced. As for my own childish impression, I confess that it was chiefly one of awe at the solemn, rather severe-looking personage, whose eyes seemed to wear an expression of such unchanging gravity behind their dark spectacles. He was in point of fact much too short-sighted to see other faces clearly, and thus no ray of recognition ever lit up his own. It was on account of his short-sightedness, and the nervousness that arose from it, that my mother always insisted on sending a manservant, carrying a lantern, to accompany Bernays home, whenever he had spent the evening with us. For the streets of Bonn were by no means brilliantly illuminated in those days. Whenever full moon was down in the almanack, then very few street lamps were lit. But certainly the moonlit nights were of exceptional loveliness. Our villa, which was called the Vinea Domini, had a beautiful big garden, sloping right down to the banks of the Rhine. Many and many an evening was spent on the terrace in the moonshine, watching the boats glide past, and it was hardly ever before the last steamer came puffing along, that the party broke up. “Here comes the late boat!” was a sort of standing joke, used as a signal for departure by more intimate friends, towards guests inclined to tarry perhaps all too long. On such occasions, when the conversation threatened to spin itself out into the small hours of the night, and my mother began to look tired out, someone--and more often than not it was Prince Reuss, the future ambassador, then young and full of high spirits--would call out: “Here is the evening boat,” and the assembly would at last disperse. To the minds of all who took part in those pleasant gatherings, the remembrance of the pretty house, with its sweet garden, must have been endeared. But they, alas, no longer exist; have long since disappeared, and the ground has been cut up and built over.