When, as a child, I made my first studies of the world around me, one of the objects which chiefly attracted my childish gaze was a picture which hung on the wall of the parlor of my home. It was a crude and inartistic picture, awkward in delineation and barbarous in color; but it was full of interest to me, for it spoke to me of a place far across the sea, a place which oft-told but never wearisome tales had surrounded with a bright halo of romance, and which my eager imagination had glorified into a veritable fairyland; it was a picture of a village in that Germany which seemed so far away and so unreal, my mother’s native place, Nordheim _vor der_ Rhön. These sentiments were not entirely, nor even mainly, due to the picture itself, but to the descriptions with which mother ע״ה used to accompany it; for mother dear, God rest her soul, among her other good qualities, had a most vivid and emphatic way of impressing her ideas upon her auditors. She was not only in loving tenderness and devotion the ideal of a Jewish parent, but a most charming and entertaining _raconteuse_, full to the brim of reminiscences of her youth, an animated chronicle of persons and events, and capable of describing both the humorous and the pathetic in an inimitably touching and taking manner. In addition to all this she was a living refutation of the favorite anti-Semitic calumny, that Jews have no sentiment of patriotism. She cherished in her heart the warmest and most unquenchable love for her native land, while her attachment to the memory of her birthplace, its ties and its traditions, approached the dignity and sincerity of a religion. No wonder that from such a stirring and enthusiastic source I imbibed the liveliest interest in all that concerned Nordheim before the Rhön, its inhabitants and its welfare. I would stand for hours at a time before that crude little picture on our parlor wall, gazing at the array of houses with startlingly red roofs and dazzlingly white walls, at the fields of brilliant green and the trees with trunks as straight as ramrods and mathematically elliptical foliage, and at the tin-soldier-like _gendarme_ whom the rustic artist, who must have inclined either to realism or militarism (I could never determine which) had depicted marching, with martial air and projecting bayonet, along the country highway.