Further there is connected with this school-room my first and perhaps most bitter martyrdom. In order to make plain what I would say I must explain a little. Even in the infant-school all the elements are to be found which the maturer man later encounters in an intensified degree, in the world. Brutality, deceit, vulgar cleverness, hypocrisy, all are represented, and a pure mind always stands there, like Adam and Eve in the picture, among the wild beasts. How much of this is to be ascribed to nature, how much to early education, or rather to neglect in the home, must remain undecided here; the fact admits of no doubt. This, then, was likewise the case in Wesselburen. Every species was to be met with, from the brutal boy who plucked the feathers from the living birds and pulled the legs off the flies, down to the light-fingered little rascal, who stole the bright colored book-marks out of the primers of his comrades. The fate which their better-behaved fellow-pupils--who were condemned to suffer on that account--sometimes angrily prophesied for the young sinners, when the good boys had happened to be the object of their jeers or their malicious tricks, was fulfilled to the letter in the case of more than one of them. The gamins always have instinct enough to know whom their sting will strike first and sharpest, and therefore I was, for a time, the one most exposed to their spite. Sometimes a boy pretended to be reading very zealously in the catechism, which he held close before his face, but instead he whispered over the top of the page all sorts of scurrilous things in my ear, and asked me if I were still stupid enough to believe that children came out of the well, and that the stork fetched them up? Sometimes another called to me "If you want an apple, take it out of my pocket, I brought one along for you!" And when I did so, he cried! "Susanna, I am being robbed," and denied having said anything to me. A third even spat upon his book and then began to howl and declared with a brazen face that I had done it.