heard the sound of the whip and the groans of the Count beneath his wife's blows. It is unnecessary to insist that in this scene, acting on a highly sensitive and somewhat peculiar child, we have the key to the emotional attitude which affected so much of Sacher-Masoch's work. As his biographer remarks, woman became to him, during a considerable part of his life, a creature at once to be loved and hated, a being whose beauty and brutality enabled her to set her foot at will on the necks of men, and in the heroine of his first important novel, the _Emissär_, dealing with the Polish Revolution, he embodied the contradictory personality of Countess Xenobia. Even the whip and the fur garments, Sacher-Masoch's favorite emotional symbols, find their explanation in this early episode. He was accustomed to say of an attractive woman: "I should like to see her in furs," and, of an unattractive woman: "I could not imagine her in furs." His writing-paper at one time was adorned with the figure of a woman in Russian Boyar costume, her cloak lined with ermine, and brandishing a scourge. On his walls he liked to have pictures of women in furs, of the kind of which there is so magnificent an example by Rubens in the gallery at Munich. He would even keep a woman's fur cloak on an ottoman in his study and stroke it from time to time, finding that his brain thus received the same kind of stimulation as Schiller found in the odor of rotten apples.[97] At the age of 13, in the revolution of 1848, young Sacher-Masoch received his baptism of fire; carried away in the popular movement, he helped to defend the barricades together with a young lady, a relative of his family, an amazon with a pistol in her girdle, such as later he loved to depict. This episode was, however, but a brief interruption of his education; he pursued his studies with brilliance, and on the higher side his education was aided by his father's esthetic tastes. Amateur theatricals were in special favor at his home, and here even the serious plays of Goethe and Gogol were performed, thus helping to train and direct the boy's taste. It is, perhaps, however, significant that it was a tragic event which, at the age of 16, first brought to him the full realization of life and the consciousness of his own power. This was the sudden death of his favorite sister. He became serious and quiet, and always regarded this grief as a turning-point in his life.