singer was a marvelous sort of being at whose feet all contemporaries knelt in adoration. My dear mother’s was altogether a rather enthusiastic, high-keyed temperament. Often she gave expression to her feelings in poems; but she had no ambition or vanity connected with this branch of her talents. She did not think herself a gifted poet; but she never lost the conviction that she _could_ have been in music a star of the first magnitude. Soon we had still more leisure to carry on our games of puff, Elvira and I. Our two mothers took a trip to the baths in the summer of the year 1855, and we two stayed at home under the charge of a governess. Their destination was Wiesbaden. The two ladies liked it so well there that in the early summer of the next year they went there again, and this time,—oh indescribable ecstasy—they took us with them. The first considerable journey in my life! Up to that time I had only been taken a few times to Vienna for two or three days, and that had been to me each time a festal occasion; but now a real journey to foreign parts, a prospective stay of weeks or perhaps months in a famous resort—it was too heavenly! Besides, utility was to be combined with pleasure there. For nothing less was intended than to carry off one or two millions from the gaming-table. Aunt Lotti regarded herself as a clairvoyant. She was always having to do with presentiments, dreams, magnetic sleep, and such things. During the epidemic of table-tipping she had also been an extraordinary medium. Under her fingers the tables danced and leaped, and then even cupboards that weighed hundreds of pounds, etc. I often saw it myself; and when I helped form the chain there was such a coruscating “fluid” coming into my finger-tips too, that everything that I touched—the tables, the piano teacher’s tall hat, and the piano itself—began to run around. I remember it clearly, and could therefore come out as a palmary witness for table-tipping if I were not distrustful of the testimony of a child’s perception. It may have been imagination. But Aunt Lotti would not let any doubts be raised as to the whole sphere of the occult in general. Nothing could offend her more than not to acknowledge her gift of second sight. In other respects she was a very sensible woman, and, as the widow of a scholar who had made her a participant in his intellectual concerns, she was many-sided in her culture and free-thinking in her tendencies; so her vein of occultism could not be taken as childish superstition. There was something else too. She often suffered from convulsions, and readily fell into hypnotic sleep, which in those days was not yet called by that name but by that of magnetic sleep, and the visions of which were rated as clairvoyance. The result was that she regarded these phenomena, which lay beyond the range of her normal waking life, as an especially mysterious power of her own, a power of vision reaching into the future.