fell, made a deep impression on me; they forced me to look upward, above myself and above everything which surrounded me, and kindled in me the spark of religious emotion. On my return from school to my father's house, I found there, too, the horrors of devastation. Our pear-tree had lost not only its young fruit but likewise all its beautiful leaves, and stood there bare as in winter: what is more, a very fruitful plum-tree, which used to supply not only ourselves but half the town besides, and, at the very least, our fairly numerous kinsfolk, had even been despoiled of the richest of its branches, and in its mutilation looked like a man with a broken arm. Though my mother found a sorry comfort in the fact that our pig was now supplied with dainty fare for a week, I could derive none at all from it, and even the pieces of glass lying around in abundance--from which the most excellent mirrors could be made in the easiest way in the world by sticking them together with damp earth--offered scarcely any compensation for the irrecoverably lost autumn pleasures. Now, however, I understood all at once why my father always went to church on Sunday, and, why I was never allowed to put on a clean shirt without saying: "God's mercy upon us!" when I did so. I had learned to know the Lord of Lords; his angry servants, thunder and lightning, hail and storm, had opened wide the portals of my heart to him, and he had entered in all his majesty. What had taken place in my soul was made manifest shortly afterward. For one evening when once again the wind blew mightily down the chimney, and the rain beat hard upon the roof as I was being put to bed, the mechanical babbling of my lips was suddenly transformed into a real, anxious prayer, and therewith the spiritual navel-string, which up to that time had bound me exclusively to my parents, was broken. Indeed things soon went so far that I began to complain to God of my father and mother when I thought I had been unjustly treated by them.