return his salutations. He chirped like a thistle-finch; many birds
around answered his call, and, ere I was aware, he had disappeared amid
the thickets with his little bare feet and his bundle of brush.
"Children," thought I, "are younger than we; they can remember when they
were once trees or birds, and are consequently still able to understand
them. We of larger growth are, alas, too old for that, and carry about
in our heads too many sorrows and bad verses and too much legal lore."
But the time when it was otherwise recurred vividly to me as I entered
Clausthal. In this pretty little mountain town, which the traveler does
not behold until he stands directly before it, I arrived just as the
clock was striking twelve and the children came tumbling merrily out of
school. The little rogues, nearly all red-cheeked, blue-eyed,
flaxen-haired, sprang and shouted and awoke in me melancholy and
cheerful memories--how I once myself, as a little boy, sat all the
forenoon long in a gloomy Catholic cloister school in Düsseldorf,
without so much as daring to stand up, enduring meanwhile a terrible
amount of Latin, whipping, and geography, and how I too hurrahed and
rejoiced, beyond all measure when the old Franciscan clock at last
struck twelve. The children saw by my knapsack that I was a stranger,
and greeted me in the most hospitable manner. One of the boys told me
that they had just had a lesson in religion, and showed me the Royal
Hanoverian Catechism, from which they were questioned on Christianity.
This little book was very badly printed, so that I greatly feared that
the doctrines of faith made thereby but an unpleasant blotting-paper
sort of impression upon the children's minds. I was also shocked at
observing that the multiplication table--which surely seriously
contradicts the Holy Trinity--was printed on the last page of the
catechism, as it at once occurred to me that by this means the minds of
the children might, even in their earliest years, be led to the most
sinful skepticism. We Prussians are more intelligent, and, in our zeal