MY EARLIEST distinct and undoubted memory of my life as a wanderer over the face of Europe, in the wake of my mother, is of the afternoon of a late summer day when, arriving from England, we landed at Boulogne-sur-mer. I see myself reluctantly trailing along on Annette's hand. On account of my curiosity, which was everlastingly attracted by trifles, especially on board ship, I was a drag on her; but she dared not let go of me, for we were approaching the gang-planks leading to the quay; she feared I might get lost in the crowd or be pushed into the water by the crush.
     I must have been about eight years old; for I had recently begun school. I did not yet show any sign of growing up into a tall young man, though I believe I was even then somewhat above the average height for my age. I was thin and looked a bit sickly; not that there was anything definitely wrong with me; but I was a poor eater and subject to terrific colds which more or less disabled me when they came.
     At Boulogne we stayed for a week or so at a hotel; and meanwhile my mother, aided by two or three agents, searched for a suitable cottage or house. The season was over; but there were still a few hardy bathers left. Her suite at the hotel had been ordered by wire; and I re-

member how I was struck by the magnificent and superabundant display of flowers in the living-room. We were used to them, especially when we moved, and it never occurred to me to ask where they came from; they came from places which we had left; and they came from places for which we were bound; in this case they also came from Boulogne and the surrounding districts. To an outsider, my mother's travels always resembled a triumphal progress.
     From this stay at Boulogne another memory emerges, a visual one. Endless interviews had taken place with crafty house-agents; and sometimes, when houses for rent had been inspected, I had been taken along. One morning a particularly cunning agent appeared at the hotel with a carriage, inviting my mother to accompany him into the country to look at a vacant chateau. I still see him standing in front of her, in the parlour of the hotel, speaking in a dulcet voice full of flattery - nobody, abroad, ever spoke to my mother in any tone but that of flattery - and praising what he had to offer. On this occasion the language was extravagant. I see him gathering the tips of his fingers and kissing them, spreading them airily as he exclaimed, "Mais c'est un bijou, madame! "
     My mother, amused, consented to go, and took me along, without Annette this time.
     Of the chateau as such I remember nothing; but the location of the place was somewhat similar to that of Thurow, though everything was on a smaller scale. The last thing the agent showed was a beach which was narrow and flanked as well as dotted with granite boulders. What followed is etched on my memory as on a copper plate.

     The agent, a small man with loosely-hung limbs, a moustache and a goatee, was standing on one of these boulders, holding forth on the surpassing merits of the place. Meanwhile, having a cold, he was frantically digging about in his pockets for a handkerchief. I, fascinated, standing by my mother's side and holding on to her left hand, followed his contortions with complete absorption and, no doubt, with an open mouth.
     Suddenly, finding no handkerchief, he reached into his hip-pocket, without ceasing to pour out his sales talk, and thence drew the remains of a roll of toilet paper. To my childish horror, he peeled off a long strip, coolly folded it into a suitable size, and, gesticulating and rhapsodizing, used it to blow his nose. Then, reaching up with an unconsciously careless but graceful gesture, he set it afloat on the salt-breeze blowing in from the channel, as if that were the most natural way of disposing of his rheum.
     As though convinced by that motion, my mother promptly rented the place, much to my delight, for I had already fallen in love with the beach and the woods above it.
     This move involved a great many things. Among others, it involved the hiring of horses, carriage, and a number of servants. It also involved our moving again in a month or so.
     As soon as we were definitely settled in town - in a house standing flush with the sidewalk of a dignified street - my mother, retaining the carriage, made a few calls, both within and without the city, received a few intimates - intimates, it seems to me today, she had in every city, large or small, of the then-known world -and settled down to her usual life of playing the piano and of reading, reading, reading.

     Me, she sent to school. There, for the first time, I was faced with the task of acquiring a boy's version of the French language. So far, my French had been that of Annette who edited it, being careful not to let me be contaminated by anything resembling a living idiom; I verily believe she made sure that a phrase was to be found in Bossuet before she used it in speaking to me. At school, however, I was soon valiantly struggling along; and, I believe, I succeeded middling well.
     Somehow my mother was less close to me abroad than at home. She seemed always to have callers. In the morning, I was not at home; in the afternoon and evening she, so it seems at this distance of time, was never alone. She was more remote and magnificent, too; perhaps for no other reason than that her callers, female as well as male, though the latter outnumbered the former, treated her with a formal deference or at least politeness which I never seemed to observe in their social intercourse with other women. None of them ever entered into any sort of relationship with me, though, of course, I was often called in to show myself and to bow and shake or even kiss hands. Whenever this happened, Annette stood by the door where nobody took the slightest notice of her. I was spoken to by these great ladies and their charming men; but I had been, and was being, taught to answer briefly, in monosyllables, taking care not to forget to add "sir" or "madam" to every word. On such occasions I wore a black velvet suit with a wide lace collar, both of which I hated as being "sissy".
     On the whole, I think, my mother was less active abroad than at home. She rarely rode out alone, though on occasion she formed one of a cavalcade; and when she did, my old admiration for her returned; she looked so

magnificent on horseback. When, at night, she dressed to go out, she was invariably more gorgeous than I ever saw her at Thurow; she was more décolletée; she wore more jewels; she was more carefully powdered and touched up.
     As for Annette, she was entering upon, and, as the years went by, advancing in, middle age; her face became more and more like that of a bulldog; her temper, with everybody but myself, became soured. It was exceedingly rare that I saw her in male company; yet, whenever we left a place, she shed tears.
     One word about school. Without ever exerting myself, I was and remained an excellent scholar. My memory never failed me; what I had once heard, I retained; and to this day I say certain things, smiling to myself, with the accents of my teachers. At Boulogne, I was much helped along by the fact that the French of my teachers was the same as Annette's who, though she spoke English fluently, was under orders to use only French with me. No language ever presented me with difficulties; and, no matter in what country we were, I always learned two versions: that of the teachers and that of the boys.
     Then, at Boulogne, one morning, at recess time, Annette appeared in the small, walled-in school-yard and summoned me home. I followed her, puzzled to find the house in confusion.
     Two or three months had gone by; my life in this little city had assumed the appearance of being settled. But my mother, it proved, was tired of the place and, on a few hours' notice, had arranged to vacate the house and to catch an early afternoon train to Paris. Already the furniture was being loaded on drays which stood drawn

up on the cobble-stone pavement of the street, to be returned to the dealer, for it had been rented. The maids were busy packing our trunks.
     At Paris, where we arrived in the evening, there followed an hour or two of chaos. It appeared that, so far, we had not so much been going somewhere as escaping the place from which we came. The question was whether to remain where we were or to go on; I believe the answer finally given was solely determined by the weather. It happened to be a raw and blustery November day; and my mother wanted the sun.
     Late at night we boarded the Riviera Express; and a day and a half later we alighted at Florence. Again we went to a hotel; and again we started on the search for a suitable place to live in. After many drives into the hills overlooking the Arno, and after much haggling with crafty house-agents, my mother rented a small villa in a fine residential quarter of the city, furnished it with rented furniture, made a few calls, and began to receive a few intimates. Thus she settled down to her usual life of playing the piano and of reading, reading, reading.
     Of course I was sent to school.
     I have sometimes wondered whether I was in her way. More and more, as the years went by, she left me and my upbringing to Annette; up to a certain point, that is; very likely it was the point which is marked by our last flight from home. From then on, I being a young man rather than a mere child, she began to like to take me along when she went out; and I accompanied her on all her shopping trips and, occasionally, to some afternoon social function. By that time she was fifty, or nearly so; and she had resigned herself to no longer being a young woman. She had had her first operation for cancer; and

a second one, much more serious, had been advised. Again and again she put it off; but her face began to be invaded by traces of suffering; and she often looked as though she foresaw a terrible end. I, on the other hand, was adolescent and full of exuberant curiosity about life. Having weathered the first onslaughts of illness, I seemed slowly to grow up into immunity. As is only natural, at the very time when, in her life abroad, my mother was inclined to fall back on her motherhood, I was growing away from her, for I was exploring paths of my own.
     We must return to Florence, however. At school, I struggled valiantly along, trying to fit myself into a new environment and to acquire a language, in two versions, for which Annette had not prepared me. It was not to be for long.
     One morning, at recess-time, Annette appeared once more to summon me home; and, as I followed her, I found the villa again in complete confusion.
     My mother, it appeared, was tired of the place and, on a few hours' notice, had arranged to vacate the house and to catch an afternoon train to the south.
     I cannot go on in detail, giving a list; sequences are disturbed in my memory. Suffice it to say that, in the course of the next few years, we alighted successively at Palermo, Zuerich, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Odessa, Moscow, St. Petersburg - still so-called -Berlin, Munich, Copenhagen, home, Edinburgh, London, Paris, Rheims, Marseille. I am stringing the names together at random as they may conceivably have followed each other, though no geographical nearness was ever a determining factor. Thus my mother, who carried on a vast correspondence, might happen to be somewhere in the Danubian basin when word came to her

that, on a given day, there would be a performance of the Ninth Symphonie at Cologne; incontinently she started for that distant city to hear it. Or the Bayreuth season might open. Seats were reserved by telegraph; and we would be there for the opening night. Every major musical event formed one occasion on which even I, even in those earlier years, was given a glimpse of the greater world. It was my mother's desire that I should grow up with a taste for great music and with a solid knowledge of the masterpieces of the past. The consequence is that, even today, there are few great operas or symphonies which I cannot hum or croak - I have no singing voice! - in spite of the fact that, after the great break in my life, forty years were to go by during which I was lucky if, once in five, six, seven years, I could listen to a performance; on one occasion, the interval was of almost exactly twenty years.
     Invariably, I was also sent for when a great performer or composer was in her drawing-room; and they all came when invited: Joachim, Nikish, Mahler, Brahms, and scores of others whose names I have forgotten. And this is perhaps the moment to say a few words of the atmosphere of her drawing-room.
     Before I do so, one word about my further education. When I was ten or eleven, a trained governess joined my mother's staff: an English-woman this time who, in addition to supervising my school work, was to teach me to play the piano and to instruct me in such modern languages as were not taught in the schools which I attended, especially Spanish. It never struck me at the time that my mother might have a definite aim in view when she urged me to pay much attention to Spanish. In Russia and, later, in Constantinople, Smyrna, Cairo, and Fez -

for as I grew up, my mother extended her trips - I was sent to private institutions, French or English; in France, Italy, and Germany I attended schools conducted in the language of the country. So, to my present regret, I never learned Russian, though, of course, now as later, I picked up a good many words and phrases. As for my music, my governess is to blame for the fact that I took a violent dislike to the piano; she tried to teach it with a ruler; and my knuckles were always sore. To my mother's great chagrin and my present poignant regret, I soon begged off; and shortly after the place of the governess was taken by a young German tutor who had no music himself. This I did not consider so serious a deficiency as that he had no Greek; for already I harboured the secret ambition to become a classical scholar. This desire, as we shall see, led to the only great conflict with my mother, who had conceived other plans with regard to my future.
     Now, though when we were abroad, there was never anything which could be called a home atmosphere, there was a very distinct and striking intellectual atmosphere in the circles which gathered about my mother; and that atmosphere had a profound and persistent influence on me and my whole development to come. No matter where we were, even in Egypt and Turkey, the people who called on my mother or on whom she called; who crowded her drawing-room or sat down at her table when she gave one of her rare dinner parties, were the men and women fewer then - who were more or less internationally known as "good Europeans", and whose names are quoted today, in the world of letters, of music, of art, of science. It is true that there were on occasion, especially in Germany and Austria, though also in France,

crowds of brilliant uniforms; but these uniforms were worn by men who, though their vocation was a military one, had wider interests and in addition were students.
     No matter where my mother went, she dropped automatically into milieus where it established a higher claim to attention and even distinction to have written a notable book, to have painted an enduring picture, to have carved a fascinating statue than to have amassed wealth or even to have ruled nations. The wealthy and the mighty were not always absent; but their credentials had to be other than wealth or power. Which does not mean that there was ever a Bohemian air about these gatherings; very much the reverse. It was only after my mother's death that I became acquainted with the borderlands of human societies. Thus, from an early age, I was taught to distinguish between the ephemerals and the essentials. Yet, strange to say, one of the four estates never figured in these circles; and that was the estate ecclesiastical.
     Which lends itself to the recording of an external fact. Soon after the operation which I had undergone in Hamburg at the age of thirteen, we spent some six months in England; it was probably in the following fall and winter; and there I was confirmed in the Anglican Church in which I had been baptized. I call it an external fact, for such it was to my mother and, consequently, to me. I was told that this was a formality which it might be wise to go through, though it was not presumed to make any profound impression on my inner life. Perhaps I might add right here that no church ever succeeded in making me other than I was, with the single exception perhaps of the Roman Catholic Church. I have always been able to discuss almost anything with Roman Cath-

olic priests; whereas with any other ecclesiastics I invariably ran up, within a few minutes, against things which were, so I felt, racially incompatible with my mentality.
     To all this I must add one other fact. From an early age I, being thus taken over the face of Europe, evinced a special, almost passionate interest in the remains of antiquity, mostly Roman, of course. I saw aqueducts, gateways, vast arenas; I saw the Forum in Rome; the ruins of the Parthenon in Athens. Pesto, Girgenti were shrines to me. And since all these places were linked to the present by the Renaissance, I soon understood that they represented mere meshes in the great web of European life. They, too, had been built by men like myself, by men like those that surrounded me - who had been children once, who had grown up, had lived their lives and had died: men who had once trembled with joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, and who yet were gone beyond recall except in as much as, perhaps, some essence of them lived on in what they had left behind. Most of them were anonymous, as nameless as the writers of the Book of Kings. What they spoke of, to us, was rather the race out of which they had arisen - a race which, on balance, seemed after all to have been greater than the race of the living. Greater, too, seemed to me those who had written the Book of Kings, the Iliad, and the Oresteja. But at least some of the works of literature remained entire; whereas these remnants . . .
     In the main, these remnants of ancient civilizations were crumbling. Though many of them had been, and a few of them continued to be, works of high art, expressive, unmistakably, of the spirit of man, so that I shivered when I realized their essence, and destined, therefore,

to live forever in the echoes of the human mind. Yet in so far as they had formed parts of great material civilizations, they had fallen, or were falling, into the dust.
     Occasionally, an American would find his way into this circle; and at least once one of them took me under his wing for a day or two, his chief object being to impress me with a sense of the new civilization which was growing up across the sea. But the fact was that I was not at all impressed with this visitor from a continent which was destined to furnish me with a home throughout the greater part of my life to come: a fact still hidden from me at the time. Yet he succeeded, by his descriptions of New York and Chicago, in creating a vision. I must have been fourteen or fifteen years old at the time; and we were at Venice. Characteristically, I, seeming to myself to stand at a point in history whence I was looking back over the last two or three millennia, or perhaps it was even five or six, for we had recently been in Egypt, at once saw that vision of an American civilization from a point in history a few millennia hence, when it would lie in ruins and when those who were building it would be forgotten and gone. There seemed to be only one difference between the ruins of the past and those of the future derived from the present, namely, that those of the future would, very likely, be less enduring than those of the past had after all proved to be. It is natural, perhaps, to draw inferences from the quality of the work as to the stature of those who created it; and, conversely, having a race of giants in mind, as the creators of what were now the ruins of the past, I looked at my American whose chief objection to Italy was that she had no coal of her own and drew a conclusion, from him, as to the race of Americans from among whom he sprang; finding them

wanting, I inferred that their work would one day be found wanting as well.
     From the cut of his clothes, from the assurance of his bearing, and from his speech I soon learned to recognize his countrymen wherever I saw them; and they impressed me like hosts of invaders from some distant planet, the moon or Mars, pullulating about the remnants left by a race of supermen of the past.
     On the ancient ruins, the Renaissance had built its world; and modern Italy was building a third world on the second. The whole globe was a palimpsest: no doubt even the Americas would one day reveal older worlds to the archeologist.
     Out of that insight, I believe, arose my ambition to study archeology.
     But it must not be imagined that I was a brooder; far from it; I enjoyed my day-to-day life as much as anyone. I was a dreamer, yes; and a dreamer with the devouring ambition to do things worthy of the past of mankind.
     I began to pick up a little Greek by myself; having mastered the alphabet, I began to read, intoxicating myself with the sound of the language. In this, my mother gave me neither help nor encouragement. Even my tutor could not assist. I came to suspect that my mother had picked him for the sake of that disability. But here and there, now in Italy, now in France, and above all in Germany, I ran across a teacher who, thinking me a queer sort of child, mischievous though I was, took me humorously at first, and indulgently, but who, as time went by, became interested and finally helped me. I was not yet fifteen when I began to decipher and to memorize passages in Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides - I seemed

to have no organ for Sophocles - in Sappho, Alcman, Alcaeus, Simonides - all of them poets. I used cribs, a dictionary, and a grammar; but I took no interest in the acquisition of the language as such and used it only as a gateway to the literature. Thus I spent hours and hours on what, to my tutor, seemed a fruitless endeavour. Yet even he found his interest in it; for it left him free to do as he pleased: one day, when he had saved enough money, he, too, wanted to carve out a university career for himself, in the law; and so he enjoyed sitting in an arm-chair, a long pipe in his mouth, to pursue his own reading while I worked away at my Greek. It saved him the task of keeping me amused or otherwise occupied.
     Strange to say, and as if to make up for his deficiency in Greek, this tutor was a great skier and skater; and my mother, whom even this may have influenced in her selection, made it a point to spend that winter in the mountains of Bohemia, chiefly, if I remember aright, at a place called Schreiberhau - I find myself unable to locate it on any map at my disposal. I became a good figure-skater; I am teaching my son today; and more than once my tutor and I went off on a day' s excursion, in a horse-drawn sleigh which took us up some mountain-slope, to descend on skis in a few minutes. All which I enjoyed with a sense of exhilaration which makes my flesh tingle today.
     Life went much more smoothly than at home. In spite of our frequent change of scene, I have, for all these years between 1880 and 1888, nothing whatever to tell of exciting episodes, such as diversified the intervals at Thurow. I became supranational or cosmopolitan, that is all. Any attempt to distinguish the years, in a geographical sense, could result in only one of two things:

either a record of slow but unbroken growth on the part of myself, and of slow but unbroken ageing on the part of my mother; or in a travelogue which would necessarily be built on conjecture only, for my memory refuses to tell me when we were where. We spent a few months at a Hungarian castle, with delightful but wholly irresponsible people of the upper aristocracy who talked of nothing but war and conquest in the Balkans; we spent another few months at Cairo, living at a hotel, in the company, chiefly, of English engineers who would come and go. We lived alternately at Paris or London, at Vienna or Berlin; but it is no longer possible to assign the trifles that linger in my memory to any particular time or locality.
     Yet, slowly, slowly, the great conflict approached, between my mother and myself - a conflict to which she rallied all her dwindling powers and every ally she could find but in which she was necessarily defeated, if only by her death. The only fact that stands out is that, when at last it came to an open fight, she had already lost the battle; and a sort of truce was declared to give her the time to die in peace. This, to me, is a heart-breaking thing, much more so today than, in the egotism of my youth, it was at the time.
     My earliest desire, with regard to my future life, had been to go to sea. That desire she had passionately and successfully fought. The last weapon she used, almost ex-post-facto, for I had already learned to laugh at my old ambition, was that she gave me the most magnificent birthday present which I have ever received in my life: a steel sailing yacht in the Baltic. I was sixteen at the time; and I believe she saw her end coming. By that present she tied herself down; for what use could that

yacht be to me unless we lived by the sea? Later, I shipped the boat about as I changed my abode; but at the time not even the possibility of such a thing occurred to either of us. It was, of course, after her break, our break, with my father; otherwise we could have gone home. As it was, we spent a long summer at Baltic sea-ports: St. Petersburg, Danzig, Luebeck, Copenhagen; and it was I who moved the baggage in my boat. My apprenticeship I served with Uncle Jacobsen who had already gained a considerable ascendancy over me.
     This Dane was a ship-broker at Hamburg, with a business which he had built up himself and in which he had prospered amazingly. How he came to know my mother, and what their exact relation had been, I cannot tell for certain. I only know that he obeyed her slightest wish, especially with regard to myself. During the years in which I was mentally mature enough to judge, let me say, from my tenth year on, he had, whenever we were in northern Europe, except at home, joined us, taking me in hand. I do not think he was a highly cultivated man, or a man of particularly fine breeding; it is true, he wore expensive clothes; but he always somehow managed, in polite company, to look just a bit untidy. In spite of his conspicuous success in business he had never married. But like my father he was an athlete, a bold swimmer, a skilful rower and sailor, and an expert at all sorts of acrobatics: these were his hobbies; and he taught me much, not by giving me instruction, but by showing me how he did certain things. He could stand on his head, walk on his hands, turn a cartwheel, and walk the tight rope; above all, he swam and dived like a fish. And soon I had the desire to do likewise. I have not the

slightest doubt that, if at the time of writing I am physically still alert and mentally nimble, I owe it to him.
     He always treated me as an equal; and when he was with us, everything else, even my school work, remained in abeyance. We rode together; and we walked together, often staying away for a whole day or longer. Whenever we were near water, he had one of his fleet of boats shipped out from Hamburg: a double skiff, or a half-outrigger boat, and finally two single-seaters with full-outrigger row-locks and sliding seats. In these boats, some of them no more than sixteen inches wide, we travelled thousands of miles, on the Rhine, the Elbe, the Oder penetrating thence into the Mosel, the Main, the Neckar, the Havel. We went to England to attend the great regattas and thus saw much of the countryside. And finally he taught me to sail.
     All this, I have no doubt today, he did at the request of my mother, and for a purpose; for he was the successful business man.
     He spent weeks and months with me, always unexpectedly turning up when we were within reasonable distance, no doubt kept informed of our movements by my mother. Invariably, when he appeared, looking inconspicuous and casual, but carrying himself with the assurance of the self-made man, I greeted him with delight; and my mother handed me over to him with the supreme confidence that, from any trip made in his company, I should come home physically improved and mentally invigorated. For years, I believe, he made himself a boy to please me or to please her. He never spoke of anything but of what was in hand. He seemed enormously and exclusively practical. Nobody could pick out the proper kind of wood for a given purpose

more unfailingly than he; nobody could as simply and convincingly explain a puzzling fact; and nobody was ever quite as ready as he to undertake what must often have appeared as the irrational whim of a child. The cost of a thing was never even as much as mentioned.
     He was about my mother's age, medium-sized, bearded, and intensely sober. But, as the years went by, he began to prefer sailing to rowing; I have no doubt that it was he who suggested the purchase of the yacht; I know that he closed the deal. During that last summer of my freedom, before my mother's final illness, we sailed from Luebeck to Haparanda and Helsingfors; and even, down the Baltic, past Thurow into the Skagerrak, along Jutland, and down the North Sea to Hamburg.
     The yacht had accommodation for four, with the galley in front of the cabin. It had three sails and was, therefore, not too large to be worked by a single man; but, of course, we were always two and took the tiller alternately. I distinctly remember our first all-night sail, into the teeth of a high wind and a rising sea, when our chief problem was to keep the water out of the cabin.
     And all this, I was to discover, represented a move in my mother's game of chess against me. Yet, unwittingly, it had been she who had spurred on my desires in the very direction which she wished to block.
     Slowly, as the conflict between us defined itself, many things came back to me which she had said to me in the past, ever since I had been her little boy; and gradually they took on their true and, to me, startling meaning.
     I must say a word about my reading here. From the time when I had mastered the mechanics of the art, I had been an omnivorous reader; and she had taken me in hand herself and directed my selection of books. By the time

I was fourteen I had a not inconsiderable library of my own; and it consisted very largely of complete sets. On every birthday I received, as a matter of course, at least one such set. The list was led by Scott; and Scott was followed by Byron. Then came Shakespeare - the latter, strange to say, at first in the German translation by Schlegel and Tieck, perhaps because we happened to be at Munich; but before the year was out I had an English Shakespeare as well. Schiller, Goethe, Manzoni, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Browning, Eliot, Macaulay, Carlyle followed; and with my pocket money I acquired classical authors in both Latin and Greek. I could not really read the latter so far, but, guided by my reading of critical utterances, I picked out certain passages, especially in Homer, concentrated on them and memorized them so thoroughly that to this day I can rattle them off by heart. Add to that, as I grew up, such divers fare as Montaigne, Pascal, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Hoelderlin, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Verga, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderon, Lesage, Corneille, Racine, Molière, and countless others of lighter weight - Stevenson, for instance, whose Kidnapped came out about that time, Mark Twain, Jules Verne - and you have a small idea of the extent of my reading. By acquiring standard histories of literature -a department of learning in which Germany excelled -I managed somehow even to organize my knowledge to a certain extent. I am, today, often amazed to find how much of my present reading is merely re-reading of what I read at the time.
     It was the appearance of Greek books on my shelves which caused my mother the first serious alarm. For years she had talked to me chiefly of her one desire that

I should become a "practical" man. Just what that implied, coming from her lips, did not become entirely clear till towards the end of this period when she began, tentatively at first, then more directly, to exemplify the "impractical" man.