The winter of 1856-57 passed without my knowing more of the capital than its official world. Even the next year, when I began to make some acquaintance with the social world, it was with an alien or adoptive phase of it, as I realize with tardy surprise. There were then so many Germans in Ohio that an edition of the laws had to be printed in their language, and there was a common feeling that we ought to know their language, if not their literature, which was really what I cared more to know. I carried my knowledge of it so far as to render a poem of my own into German verse which won the praise of my teacher; and I wish I could remember who he was, gentle, tobacco-smoked shade that he has long since become, or who the German editor of what _republikanische Zeitung_ was that sometimes shared my instruction with him. There were also two blithe German youths who availed with me in the loan of Goethe's _Wahlverwandschaften_, and gave me some fencing lessons in their noonings. I forget what employ they were of, but their uncle was a watchmaker and jeweler, and my father got him to gold-plate his silver watch, or dye it, as he preferred to say. When the Civil War came he went into it and was killed; and many years afterward, in my love and honor of him, I turned his ghost into a loved and honored character in _A Hazard of New Fortunes_. He was a political refugee, of those German revolutionists who came to us after the revolts of 1848, and he still dwells venerable in my memory, with his noble, patriarchally bearded head. But it all appears very fantastic in the retrospect, that Teutonic period of my self-culture, and I am not sure that one fact of it is more fantastic than another. Such was my zeal for everything German that I once lunched at one of the German beer-saloons which rather abounded in Columbus, on Swiss cheese with French mustard spread over it and a tall glass of lager beer, then much valued as a possible transition from the use of the strong waters more habitual with Americans than now; but it made me very sick, and I was obliged to forego it as an expression of my love for German poetry. To a little earlier period must have belonged the incident of my going to see "_Die Räuber_" of Schiller, which I endured with iron resolution from the beginning to the end. It was given, I believe, by amateurs, and I tried my best to imagine that I understood it as it went on, but probably I did not, though I would have been loath to own the fact to any of the few German families who then formed my whole acquaintance with society. I never afterward met them at American houses; the cleavage between the two races in everything but politics was absolute; though the Germans were largely anti-slavery, and this formed common ground for them and natives of like thinking who did not know them socially.