He confesses that he was once “a green youth, full of the materialistic doctrine.”[56] What he does not seem to realize is that he has never recovered from this adolescent characteristic. But it is always a relief to turn from his “interpretations” to the honest facts of his life--to read that he once spent a “charmingly beautiful day” with his wife looking from the window of a hotel (evidently the Danieli) on the riva Schiavoni, at Venice, watching the English warships that were taking part in a _fiesta_; and to know that his wife was interested in the toilet-table of an “Etruscan lady” in a Venetian museum. It was “a rectangular black object with two handles, with little boxes for rouge and powders,” and the _gnädige Frau_ “thought it would be nice to have in the house.” By rare good fortune, Freud failed to dream of these little boxes, or at least forgot to mention it if he did. Upon a less happy occasion he becomes so vexed with Mrs. Freud that when she gives him a book as a present he immediately forgets it--thus living up to his absurd theory that we only remember things which have agreeable associations. Then his “beloved mother” falls sick, and his wife takes such “tender care of her” that the domestic breach is healed. So the victim of amnesia suddenly recovers his memory, and walks straight to the lost book, “like a somnambulist.” One likes also to turn to the amusingly recounted hardships of his student days, and to learn that the five years provided for the study of medicine was “as usual” not enough for the future great man. So he “worked along unconcernedly,” though “considered a loafer” by his associates, who doubted if he would ever “get through.” He had intended to study law, but was moved to take up science upon reading Goethe’s “beautiful essay on Nature.” He never did get through very far, and failed in his examinations for the degree of Doctor of Legal Medicine. Consequently, when he dreams of examinations the subject is invariably botany, zoology, chemistry or history--it being another of his contentions that no one ever dreams of examinations excepting those in which one has succeeded. On the other hand, one dreams only of the trains which one has missed, such dreams being “consolation” dreams, directed against the fear of dying. One missed the train--that is, one did not “depart,” did not die. Railroad travel seems to be dangerous in Austria. Freud always wanted to be “a professor _extraordinarius_,” but was held back by the fact that he was a Jew in a country where appointments were in the hands of Gentile politicians. By way of compensation he is now a doctor of laws, _honoris causa_.