Let us now accompany the student Goethe to Strassburg and pay a visit to the inn “Zum Geist,” where his friendship with Herder, so important for his future development, was formed. “I visited Herder morning and evening, I even remained whole days with him ... and daily learned to appreciate his beautiful and great qualities, his extensive knowledge, and his profound views.” In Leipzig, the next university where Goethe studied, he lived in a house, between the old and the new market, which was called after its sign “Die Feuerkugel.” One of the first calls he made was to the literary dictator Gottsched, who “lived very respectably in the first story of the ‘Golden Bear,’ where the elder Breitkopf, on account of the great advantage which Gottsched’s writings had brought to the trade, had assured him a lodging for life.” This Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf was the inventor of music printing and the founder of the famous publishing firm of to-day. His house, the “Golden Bear,” number 11 Universitätsstrasse, is to-day the home of the Royal Saxon Institute for universal history and the history of civilization, founded by the distinguished historian Lamprecht. In Goethe’s day Breitkopf’s son built a great new house opposite the “Golden Bear” which was called “Zum Silbernen Bären.” A very popular sign in those days, in Germany, and especially in the neighborhood of Frankfurt, was the pentacle. Goethe calls it simply the beer-sign in his autobiography, where he tells us a charming story based on an ingenious and humorous interpretation of the two triangles which compose the sign. While still living as a young lawyer in Mutter Aja’s house, he entertained two distinguished visitors, the famous Lavater and the educational reformer Basedow. To amuse them he arranged carriage drives in the pleasant country around his native town. We see the young fire-brand sitting between these two dignified men:-- “The prophets sat on either side, The world-child sat between them.” On one of these excursions Basedow had offended the pious and sweet-tempered Lavater by his cynical remarks about the Trinity and so spoiled the pleasant atmosphere of good comradeship. Goethe punished him in the following humorous manner. “The weather was warm and the tobacco smoke had perhaps contributed to the dryness of Basedow’s palate; he was dying for a glass of beer. Seeing a tavern at a distance on the road he eagerly ordered the coachman to stop there.” But Goethe urged him to go on without seeming to mind the furious protest of the thirsty Basedow, whom he simply calmed with the words: “Father, be quiet, you ought to thank me! Luckily you didn’t see the beer-sign! It was two triangles put together across each other. Now, you commonly get mad about one triangle, and if you had set your eye on two we should have had to put you in a strait-jacket.”