I remember the time when I woke with my breath frozen on my bedclothes into a thin sheet of ice. We were expected to wash and dress in an attic where the windows were so thickly frozen as to admit hardly any light in the morning, and where, when we tried to break the ice in the jug, there were only a few drops of water left at the bottom with which to wash. No wonder that the ablutions were expeditious. After they were performed we had our speedy breakfast, consisting of a cup of coffee and a _semmel_ or roll, and then we rushed to school, often through the snow that had not yet been swept away from the pavement. We sat in school from eight to eleven or twelve, rushed home again, had our very simple dinner, and then back to school, from two to four. How we lived through it I sometimes wonder, for we were thinly clad and often wet with rain or snow; and yet we enjoyed our life as boys only can enjoy it, and had no time to be ill. One blessing this early roughing has left me for life—a power of enjoying many things which to most of my friends are matters of course or of no consequence. The background of my life at Dessau and at Leipzig may seem dark, but it has only served to make the later years of my life all the brighter and warmer. The more I think about that distant, now very distant past, the more I feel how, without being aware of it, my whole character was formed by it. The unspoiled primitiveness of life at Dessau as it was when I was at school there till the age of twelve, would be extremely difficult to describe in all its details. Everybody seemed to know everybody and everything about everybody. Everybody knew that he was watched, and gossip, in the best sense of the word, ruled supreme in the little town. Gossip was, in fact, public opinion with all its good and all its bad features. Still the result was that no one could afford to lose caste, and that everybody behaved as well as he could. I really believe that the private life of the people of Dessau at the beginning of the century was blameless. The great evils of society did not exist, and if now and then there was a black sheep, his or her life became a burden to them. Everybody knew what had happened, and society being on the whole so blameless, was all the more merciless on the sinners, whether their sins were great or small. So from the very first my idea was that there were only two classes—one class quite perfect and pure as angels, the other black sheep, and altogether unspeakable. There was no transition, no intermediate links, no shading of light and dark. A man was either black or white, and this rigid rule applied not only to moral character, but intellectual excellence also was measured by the same standard. A work of art was either superlatively beautiful, or it was contemptible. A man of science was either a giant or a humbug. Some people spoke of Goethe as the greatest of all poets and philosophers the world had ever known;