Hans Unwirrsch was a precocious child and learnt to speak almost before he learnt to walk; reading came as easily to him as playing. Auntie Schlotterbeck understood the difficult art well and only stumbled over words that were all too long or all too foreign. She liked to read aloud and with a whining pathos which made the greatest impression on the child. Her library was composed mainly of the Bible, hymn book and a long series of popular almanacs which followed one another without a break from the year 1790 and each of which contained a touching, a comic or a thrilling story besides a treasury of home and secret remedies and a fine selection of humorous anecdotes. For the lively imagination of a child an infinitely rich world was hidden in these old numbers, and spirits of all sorts rose out of them, smiled and laughed, grinned, threatened and led the young soul alternately through thrills of awe and ecstasies. When the rain pelted against the panes, when the sun shone into the room, when thunderstorms reached across the roofs with black arms of cloud and hurled their red flashes above the town, when the thunder rolled and the hail pattered and bounded on the street pavement, in some way all these things came to be connected with the figures and scenes in the almanacs and the heroes and heroines of the stories strode through good and bad weather, perfectly clear, plain and distinct, past dreamy little Hans who had laid his head in the old spirit-seer's lap. The story of "good little Jasper and pretty little Annie" struck a chord in his heart which continued to ring through Hans' whole life; but the "book of books," the Bible, made a still greater impression on the boy. The simple grandeur of the first chapters of Genesis cannot but overwhelm children as well as grown people, the poor in spirit as well as the millionaires of intellect. Infinitely credible are these stories of the beginnings of things and credible they remain even though every day it is more clearly proven that the world was not created in seven days. At Auntie Schlotterbeck's feet Hans lost himself with shuddering delight in the dark abyss of chaos: and the earth was without form and void;--till God divided the light from the darkness and the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. When sun, moon and stars began their dance and God let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, then he breathed freely again; and when the earth brought forth grass and herb and the tree yielding fruit, when the water, the air and the earth brought forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life and every winged fowl after his kind, then he clapped his little hands and felt that he stood on firm ground once more. The manner in which God breathed the breath of life into Adam was perfectly clear to him and of incontrovertible truth, whereas the first critical doubt arose in the child's mind when the woman was created out