Curiously enough nearly all these early memories were of winter time. There was a ring of vapor round the flame of the lamp and the breath was drawn in a cloud toward the light; the frozen window-panes shimmered, it was bitterly cold, and with the comfort of his warm safe bed there was mixed for the little watcher the dread of the bitter cold from which he had to hide his little nose under the cover. He could not understand why his mother got up so early while it was so dark and cold and while such mad black shadows passed by on the wall, nodded, straightened themselves up and bent down. His ideas of the places where his mother went were still less clearly defined; according to the mood in which he happened to be he imagined these places to be more or less pleasant and with his imaginings were mixed all sorts of details out of fairy-tales and fragments of conversation that he had heard from grown people and which, in these vague moments between sleeping and waking, took on more and more variegated colors and mixed with one another. At last his mother had finished dressing and bent once more over the child's bed. Once more he received a kiss, all kinds of good admonitions and tempting promises so that he should lie still, should not cry, should go to sleep again soon. To these were added the assurance that morning and Auntie Schlotterbeck would come soon; the lamp was blown out, the room sank back into the deepest darkness, the door squeaked, his mother's steps grew fainter;--sleep took possession of him again quickly and when he woke the second time Auntie Schlotterbeck was generally sitting by his bed and the fire was crackling in the stove in the next room. Although she was not older than Mrs. Christine Unwirrsch, Auntie Schlotterbeck had always been Auntie Schlotterbeck. No one in Kröppel Street knew her by any other name and she was as well known in Kröppel Street as "Old Fritz," emperor "Napoleum" and old Blücher, although she bore no other resemblance to these three famous heroes than that she took snuff like the great Prussian king, and had an aquiline nose like the "Corsican ravager." As to any resemblance to Marshal "Forward!" that would indeed have been difficult to find.