And the poem on page 109 refers to my grandmother, out of whose soul the character of Marah Durimeh has grown, this oriental princess, which symbolises to my and my readers the "soul of mankind". After I had read so about everything that was to be found in the private households of Hohenstein-Ernstthal in the form of books of every genre, and had also copied or made notes of much, very much of it, father started looking around for new sources. There had been three of them, these were the libraries of the cantor, the principal, and the minister. The cantor proved to be the most reasonable one of the three in this respect as well. He said, he had no books for entertainment, but only books for learning, and I was still far too young for those, then. But nevertheless, he parted with one of them, for the thought, it might be very useful for me as member of the choir to learn how to translate the Latin texts of our hymns into the the German language. This book was on Latin grammar; the title page was missing, but on the next page it read: "A boy must get his lessons down, for him to be a dominus, [a] but if he learns just with a frown, thus he will be an asinus!" [b] [a] dominus (Latin) = master, lord [b] asinus (Latin) = donkey, ass Father was truly delighted about this four-lined rhyme and stated that I should take good care that would not become an asinus, but rather a dominus. So, now I was to get busy and quickly learn some Latin! Soon afterwards, some families of Ernstthal arrived at the decision to emigrate to America, in the coming year. Therefore, their children were to learn as much English as possible during this period of time. It goes without saying that I had to join them! And then it happened that in some manner, I do not recall how, a book came into our possession, containing French songs of the Freemasons, both lyrics and melodies. It had been printed in the year 1782 in Berlin and was dedicated to "His Royal Highness, Friedrich Wilhelm, prince of Prussia". Just for that, it had to be good and of a very high value! The title read: "Chansons maçonniques", and the melody I liked the most had seven four-lined stanzas to be sung to it, the first of which I would like to quote here: "Nous vénérons de l'Arabie La sage et noble antiquité, Et la célèbre Confrairie Transmise à la postérité." [a] [a] We venerate Arabia, the wise and noble ancient world, and the famous Brotherhood (confrérie), passed on to posterity. The term "songs of the Freemasons" had a particular attraction. What a delight to be able to delve into the secrets of freemasonry! Luckily, the principal also gave private lessons in French. He permitted me to enter into this "circle", and so it happened that I had to deal with Latin, English, and French now all at the same time.