OF THE 



UNIVERSITY 



CALIFORNIA- 



My earliest recollection is of an act of juvenile 

 heroism, which perhaps imprinted itself so indelibly 

 on my mind on account of its striking effect on the 

 development of my character. My parents lived till 



\ my eighth year in Lenthe near Hanover, where I was 

 born , and where my father farmed the estate (Ober- 



I gut) of a Herr von Lenthe. I must have been about 

 live years of age when, playing one day in my father's 

 room, sister Matilda, my senior by three years, was 

 led in weeping copiously. She was on her way to 

 the parsonage for her knitting lesson, but a dangerous 

 gander, she complained, kept barring her entrance into 

 the parsonage yard, and had already repeatedly snapped 

 at her. Accordingly she stoutly refused, despite all 

 her mother's coaxing, to repair to her lesson without 

 a companion. My father, too, could not succeed in 

 shaking her determination. At last he gave me his stick, 

 which was considerably bigger than myself, saying: 

 4 'Then Werner shall go with you, who I hope has 

 more courage than you have."' At first that appeared 

 to me somewhat questionable, for my father dismissed 

 me with the injunction: i; If the gander conies, only go 

 towards him bravely and hit him well with the stick, 

 then he will run away!" And so it turned out. When 



