and beetles, diligently chased over hill
and dale, or the reward of much exploring
upon trees, among herbs, and under sunny
bits of rock, or in the pools under the
mountains. Our fancy worked in all our play. We
spent many a summer afternoon in a craggy
dell, acting robber tales that we created for
ourselves. Half way up a rock, some of us
found a little nook approached through thick
bushes by an obscure path, which had been
used once by a hermit. We made a secret of
it, and created it into a robbers' rendezvous;
a band of gens d'armes was formed, while
others volunteered to play the part of travellers
and wander through the wood, which was a
very real wood. We had attacks, rescues,
searches, captures, and stored up a great body
of varied incident, until our career was stopped
by the fall of a bold robber down a rock
which he had scaled to rescue a companion.
The rock was then forbidden, and as it overhung
the place of rendezvous the game was
spoiled.

It was no great check on the play of our
imaginations that the pious Moravians forbade
novels and plays as reading, and restricted us
to edifying stories about Easter eggs and other
holy things. Shakspeare, being a play writer
was taken away from any English boy by
whom he was imported, and restored at his
departure. We still found, however, many
fanciful books, and there was no reason why
we should not contribute to each other all we
knew concerning Schinderhannes,
Eulenspiegel, and such worthies. We were
encouraged to tell tales of wonder to each other. I
had not been long in the school before I
committed what would have been in England the
enormous offence of filling a copy-book given
to me for school uses, with a story about a
green huntsman, who went up a hill through
a wood, and heard a mysterious shot, and of
what followed. Brother Renchling found the
book and took it to his desk. Had he been
a British schoolmaster of the same date—woe
to my skin! Brother Renchling smoked a
pipe over the crude, childish composition,
and in the next playtime offered to read to
the room Damon's story. Straightway he
began to deliver it from the book in German,
either much embellished by translation, or to
the most complaisant of audiences; and instead
of a thrashing, Damon had for doing what was
surely a fair self-imposed exercise, the reward
of popular applause.

Then James Damon had a Rudolf
Pythias in a pale young German, called the
Baron, because he always wore a fine
black velvet frock. Damon and Pythias
were inseparable; their desks were side by
side, and they went far ahead or lagged far
behind in the school walks, their usual
occupation being the exchange of wonderful
stories out of memory till memory was
exhausted, and then out of recombinations
and invention. A stray companion attached
himself to us sometimes, and then another,
until at last we lost our privacy, and came to be
appointed joint story-tellers and poets laureate
in the rooms to which we belonged, with a
reputation that extended over the rooms next
above and below us. We had to produce
verses on birth-days and school feasts, and to
tell stories to order. A committee would try its
skill in setting us the hardest wonder-subjects.
In one case, for example, an appointed hero
was to escape from a tower with walls three
hundred feet above the ground and three hundred
feet below it, and without doors and windows;
he was to have his clothes stolen from
his back in daytime, while he was awake, yet
without being aware of the theft; he was to
swim through a river without being wet, and
to do other such things. To Brother Renchling,
who fell in so pleasantly with all these
humours, it must have been amusing enough
to hear the decisions of the jury that accepted,
or refused as possible or impossible, the
solutions we worked out for all such problems.
A child's notion of the possible and impossible
in magic, of what is not fit and proper for
the business of the marvel-monger, must
furnish stuff for pleasant study to thoughtful
man.

Then we had festivals that did us in a few
days lexicon loads of good. We always went
out in the warm spring weather at
Whitsuntide, for a long—perhaps, week long—
ramble from hill to hill and town to town:
now mounted upon donkeys, now rumbling in
country-carts, now floating down the river in
flat bottomed boats, but always proudest and
best pleased when we were a-foot. How intense
was our enjoyment of those walks! We slept
where we halted for the night: in barns, in
kitchens,—once in an old ruin—commonly on
straw—one night only, in a town hotel on
feathers, which we hated. It vexed us to
have to tell our friends, who had gone out in
other directions, that we had been supping in
a common hotel, like milksops, and sleeping
through one of our nights on feather beds.
Some amends were made to us on the
succeeding night, when it appeared that a few of
our party would be put to sleep in a huge
oven. The glorious possibility of being
forgotten, and of the housewife's coming in the
morning, half sleepy, to set light to the straw,
was a sublime thought to dismiss ourselves
to sleep upon. We always preferred the halting
places where we got the blackest bread;
and we thought a farmhouse on a mountain,
where the water was almost as expensive
as the wine, incomparably a better
hostelry than the Blue Angel, at Wiesbaden.
Among towns, we liked best the fortresses in
which we had prisons to see, and in which
there were men at work with iron balls
chained to their legs; next to the
fortresses, we liked the towns that had grand
churches in them; it delighted us to scramble
to the organ-loft and get a grizzly and
good-natured organist to play for us, and let
us sound with our own finger the vox