It was like a recollection of a Paradise, and such a recollection, even if it brought out the contrast between the dream-world and the real world, would often set children musing on what ought and what ought not to be. They did not long believe in Dornröschen and Schneewittchen, they learnt but too soon that Dornröschen and Schneewittchen belonged to another world. They may even have come to learn that Dornröschen (thorn-rose) and Schneewittchen (snow-white) were meant originally for the sleep or death of nature in her snow-white shroud, and the return of the sun; but woe to the boy who on first learning these stories should have declared that they were mere bosh, or, as Sir Walter Scott says, the detritus of nature-myths. My father’s father, whom I never knew, seems not to have been distinguished in any way. He was, however, a useful tradesman and a respected citizen of Dessau, and, as I see, the founder of the first lending library in that small town. He married a second time, a rich widow, chiefly, as I was told, to enable him to give his son, my father, a liberal education. She grew to be very old, and I well remember her, to me, forbidding and terrifying appearance. She quite belonged to a past generation, and when I saw her again after having been in England, she asked me whether I had seen Napoleon who had been taken prisoner and sent to England, but had lately escaped and resumed his throne in Paris. She evidently mixed up the two Napoleons, and I did not contradict her. To me her conversation was interesting as showing how little the traditions of the people can be relied on, and how easily, by the side of real history, a popular history could grow up. After all, the poems of Charlemagne besieging Jerusalem owed their origin very likely to some similar confusion in the minds of old women. My sister and I were always terrified when we were sent to visit her, for with her dishevelled grey hair, her thin white face, and her piercing eyes, she was to us the old grandmother, or the witch of Grimm’s stories; and the language she used was such that, if we repeated it at home, we were severely reprimanded. She knew very little about my father, but her memory about her first husband and about her own youth and childhood was very clear, though not always edifying. Her stories about ghosts, witches, ogres, nickers, and the whole of that race were certainly enough to frighten a child, and some of them clung to me for a very long time. On my mother’s side my relations were more civilized, and they had but little social intercourse with my grandmother and her relatives. My mother’s father was von Basedow, the President, that is Prime Minister of the Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau, a position in which he was succeeded by his eldest son, my uncle. He was the first man in the town; the Duke and he really ruled the Duchy exactly as they pleased. There was no check on them of any kind, and yet no one, as far as I know, ever complained of any tyranny.