I was born on February the 25th, 1842, in the tiny town of Ernstthal <Earnest Valley> in the Erzgebirge <Ore Mountains> [a], which was a very poor and small town then, mostly populated by weavers. Now, it has been incorporated into the slightly larger Hohenstein <High Rock>. There were nine of us: my father, my mother, both grandmothers, four sisters, and me, the only boy. My mother's mother scrubbed floors for other people and span cotton. On some occasions, she earned more than 25 pfennig per day. Then, she became generous and gave us five children two tiny rolls of bread, which only cost four pfennig, because they were extremely hard and stale, often even moldy. She was a kind, hard working, silent woman, who never complained. She died, as one would say, of old age. The real reason for her death was probably what is nowadays discretely termed as "being underfed". About my other grandmother, my father's mother, there is more to tell, but not here, at this point. My mother was a martyr, a saint, always quiet, infinitely hard working, constantly willing to make a sacrifice for other, even poorer people in spite of our own poverty. Never ever, I have heard her speak a bad word. She was a blessing for everyone she met, and a special blessing for us, her children. No matter how hard she suffered, she would never let anyone know about it. But at night, when she sat, busily knitting, by the light of the small, smoking oil-lamp and thought no one was watching, it happened that a tear came to her eye to run down her cheek, vanishing even faster than it had appeared. With one movement of the fingertips this trace of her sufferings was instantly wiped away. [a] Erzgebirge: the mountain range which forms the border of Saxony with Bohemia. The name of the town is spelled "Ernsttal" throughout most of the original book. In 1901, there had been a reform of the German spelling system, changing "th" into "t" in all words where it does not transliterate the Greek letter theta. Thus "Thal" <valley> became "Tal". But this change should not be applied to names of places and persons.