By the rarest accident I have obtained some account of the birth and childhood of Wieland. It appears that he is a German born, being the youngest of six sons of Hans Wieland, a poor and most amiable doll-maker, a citizen of Hildesheim. When only four years old the child was lost in the Hartz Mountains, whither his father and several neighbours had resorted to make holiday. The child had from his cradle manifested the greatest propensities towards the ludicrous; it was his delight to place his father’s dolls in the most preposterous positions, doing this with a seriousness, a gravity, in strange contrast with his employment. It was plain to Professor Teufelskopf, a frequent visitor at the shop of old Wieland, employed by the professor on toys that are yet to astound the world—being no other than a man and wife and four children, made entirely out of pear-tree, and yet so exquisitely constructed, as to be enabled to eat and drink, cry, and pay taxes, with a punctuality and propriety not surpassed by many machines of flesh and blood—I say it was the opinion of Professor Teufelskopf that young Wieland was destined to play a great part among men, an opinion we are happy to say nightly illustrated by the interesting subject of this memoir. We have, however, to speak of his adventures when only four years old, in the Hartz Mountains. For a whole month was the child missing, to the agony of its parents, and the deep regret of all the citizens of Hildesheim, with whom little George was an especial favourite. The mountains were overrun by various parties in search of the unfortunate little vagrant, but with no success. It was plain that the boy had been caught away by some spirit of the mines with which the marvellous districts abound, or, it might be, carried to the very height of the Brockenberg, by the king of the mountains, to be his page and cup-bearer. The gravest folks of the Hildesheim shook their heads, and more than two declared that they never thought George would grow up to be a man—he was so odd, so strange, so fantastic, so unlike any other child. The despair of Hans Wieland was fast settling into deep melancholy, and he had almost given up all hope, when, as he sat brooding at his fireside one autumn night, his wife—she had quitted him not a minute to go upstairs—uttered a piercing shriek. Hans rushed from the fireside, and in an instant joined his wife, who, speechless with delight and wonder, pointed to the nook in the chamber where little George was wont to sleep, and where, at the time, but how brought there was never, never known, the boy lay in the profoundest slumber; in all things the same plump, good-looking child, save that his cheek was more than usually flushed. Hans Wieland and his wife fell upon their knees and sobbed thanksgivings.