It had been a dreadful time, especially for the poor inhabitants of that area were I was at home. Living in the present times of prosperity, it is almost impossible to imagine how miserably people starved through their days in the end of the 1840s. Unemployment, deformity, inflation, and revolution, these four words explain it all. We lacked almost everything that is required for the body's sustenance and relief. At lunchtime, we asked our neighbour, the innkeeper of the inn called "Zur Stadt Glauchau" <The City of Glauchau's>, for the potato peelings, to use the few scraps that might still be attached to them for a hunger-soup. We went to the "Red Mill", where we got a handful of dust from the empty bags and the spelt that had been thrown out for free, to turn it into something resembling food. We plucked atriplex [a] from the rubble dumps, otterzungen [b] from the ridges of the fields, and wild lettuce from the fences, to cook it and to fill our stomachs with it. The leaves of the atriplex felt greasy. This resulted in two or three little drops of fat floating on the surface of the water, when they were cooked. How nutritious and how delicious did this seem to us! Luckily, there were also a few stocking-weavers among the many unemployed weavers of our town, whose business had not stopped entirely. They wove gloves, these extremely cheap, white gloves, corpses are dressed up with, before they are buried. Mother succeeded in getting the job of sewing such burial-gloves together. There we sat, all of us except father, from early in the morning until late at night, stitching away. Mother sewed the thumbs, for this was difficult, grandmother sewed the sides with little finger, and I, together with my sisters, sewed the middle fingers. When we had all worked very hard, we had all together earned eleven or even twelve new-groschen by the end of the week. What a financial stock! For this, we got beetroot-syrup for five pfennig, spread on five tiny rolls of bread; these were very conscientiously divided into pieces and passed around. It was just as much a reward for the past week as it was an incentive for the next. [a] Melde = atriplex: some kind of a weed from the goosefoot family (chenopodiaceae), also known as orach or orache in English. [b] Otterzungen: Germany's most respected dictionary, the "Duden", defines this as a "petrified fish-tooth". This seems a bit strange to me. I would rather guess that it must be some kind of a plant. Literally it would mean "adders' tongues".