And therefore, I too have to describe my family just as they have been in reality, whether this might be regarded as being contrary to child's duty or not. I do not only have to be truthful concerning them and me, but also concerning all of my fellow-men. Perhaps someone else could learn from our example to do the right thing in his own affairs. - - [a] "Erbsünde": the German expression for "original sin" suggests rather a meaning of "inherited sin". Actually, the idea of Adam's original sin being inherited by every human being at birth is rather common among Catholics and Protestants (but is rejected by Orthodox Christians). I have been told that this belief is based on a misinterpretation of Romans 5:12 by St. Augustine, who interpreted the words for "sin" and "death" as synonymous in this verse: "as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men". Entirely unexpectedly, mother had inherited a house as well as a few small, linen money-pouches from a distant relative. One of these money-pouches contained lots of two-pfennig-pieces, another one lots of tree-pfennig-pieces, and a third one lots of groschen [a]. A fourth one contained three score of fifty-pfennig-pieces, and in the fifth and last pouch, ten old pieces of six from Schaffhausen, ten eight-groschen-pieces, five gulden [b], and four taler [c] were found. This was really a fortune! In our poverty, it seemed almost like a million! Granted, the house was just as wide as three small windows and largely built of wood, but on the other hand, it was three storeys high and had on the very top, right under the ridge of the roof, a pigeonry, which is, of course, not so commonly found. Grandmother, my father's mother, moved into the ground floor, which only consisted of one room with two windows and the entrance. Behind the room was a chamber with an old mangle, which was rented to other people at two pfennig per hour. There were happy Saturdays, when this mangle earned us ten, twelve, yes even fourteen pfennig. This increased our standard of living quite extensively. On the first floor, the parents lived with us. There stood the loom with its reel. On the second floor, we slept with a colony of mice and some larger rodents, who usually lived in the pigeonry and only visited us at night. There also was a cellar, but it was always empty. Once, it held a few bags of potatoes, but they did not belong to us, but rather to a neighbour, who did not have his own cellar. Grandmother remarked that it would be much better, if the cellar belonged to him and the potatoes to us. The yard was just big enough for us five children to stand in it without crowding each other. It adjoined the garden, which contained an elder-bush, an apple-tree, and a plum-tree, as well as small pond, which we called our "lake". The elder-bush supplied us with the tea, we drank in order to get into