I remember more particularly one young master who was very kind to me, and took me home for private lessons and for giving me some good advice. There was something sad and very attractive about him, and I found out afterwards that he knew that he was dying of consumption, and that besides that he was liable to be prosecuted for political liberalism, which at that time was almost like high treason. I believe he was actually condemned and sent to prison like many others, and he died soon after I had left Dessau. His name was Dr. Hönicke, and he was the first to try to impress on me that I ought to show myself worthy of my father, an idea which had never entered my mind before, nay, which at first I could hardly understand, but which, nevertheless, slumbered on in my mind till years afterwards it was called out and became a strong influence for the whole of my life. I still have some lines which he wrote for my album. They were the well-known lines from Horace, which, at the time, I had great difficulty in construing, but which have remained graven in my memory ever since: “Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis, Est in iuvencis est in equis patrum Virtus nec imbellem feroces Progenerant aquilae columbam. Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam, Rectique cultus pectora roborant; Utcunque defecere mores, Dedecorant bene nata culpae.” In my childhood I had to pass through the ordinary illnesses, but it was the faith in our doctor that always saved me. The doctor was to my mind the man who was called in to make me well again, and while my mother was agitated about her only son, I never dreamt of any danger. The very idea of death never came near me till my grandfather died (1835), but even then I was only about twelve years old, and though I had seen much of him, particularly during the years that my mother lived again in his house, yet he was too old to take much share in his grandchildren’s amusements. He left a gap, no doubt, in our life, but that gap was filled again with new figures in the life of a boy of twelve. He was only sixty-one years old when he died, and yet my idea of him was always that of a very old man. Everything was done for him, his servant dressed him every morning, he was lifted into his carriage and out of it, and he certainly lived the life of an invalid, such as I should not consent to own to at seventy-six. He made no secret that he cared more for the son of his son who was the heir, and was to perpetuate the name of von Basedow, than for the son of his daughter. He was very fond of driving and of shooting, and he frequently took my cousin out shooting with him. When my cousin came home with a hare he had shot, I confess I was sometimes jealous, but I was soon cured of my wish to go with my grandfather into the forest. Once when I was with him in his little carriage, my grandfather, not being able to see well, had the misfortune to kill a doe which had come out with her two