EARLY YOUTH 27 



described in HaeckePs splendid monograph, the 

 flinty shells of which are amongst the finest artistic 

 treasures of nature. She called them the " dear 

 radiolaria " with all the tenderness of the 

 emotional man of science who had felt a sort of 

 psychic relation, a living affinity, to the tiny 

 microscopic strangers he had been the first to 

 arrange and describe in their thousands. Smiling, 

 with quiet pride, she told me how her nephew 

 visited her, when he came to Berlin ; how, with 

 the unassuming ways of this sound stock, he 

 chose to sleep in the clothes-drying loft ; how 

 he invited his friends to come and hear of his 

 voyages and work, bringing thirty of them to share 

 a single dish of herring-salad in his naive way, and 

 how, as they continued to pour in, he made seats 

 for them of boards and tubs, and fed them with his 

 wonderful genius for anecdote so that none went 

 away fasting. She dwelt with entire satisfaction on 

 the last, the '^zoological" phase, of the Haeckel- 

 Sethe house. Yet it all blended softly with the 

 old and the past of nearly a century ago. Over 

 the patriarchal furniture hung the oil painting of 

 Christoph Sethe, with the large Koman nose 

 that runs through the family down to Ernst 

 Haeckel himself, and gives the chief feature to 

 his otherwise soft profile. Under a glass shade, 

 in the old fashion of our grandfathers that we 

 perhaps do not sufficiently appreciate, w^as a fine 

 bust of Schleiermacher. He was a friend of the 

 Sethes. Bertha Sethe was confirmed by him. 

 He died four days before Ernst Haeckel was 



