up for the absence of children for a time.  The two sisters, neither of whom had had any real education, often returned playfully to the ways of their childhood.  When they sang children’s duets, Minna, though she had had no musical training, always managed very cleverly to sing seconds, and afterwards, as we sat at our evening meal, eating Russian salad, salt salmon from the Dwina, or fresh Russian caviare, we were all three very cheerful and happy far away in our northern home.

Amalie’s beautiful voice and real vocal talent at first won for her a very favourable reception with the public, a fact which did us all a great deal of good.  Being, however, very short, and having no very great gift for acting, the scope of her powers was very limited, and as she was soon surpassed by more successful competitors, it was a real stroke of good luck for her that a young officer in the Russian army, then Captain, now General, Carl von Meek, fell head over ears in love with the simple girl, and married her a year later.  The unfortunate part of this engagement, however, was that it caused many difficulties, and brought the first cloud over our menage a trois.  For, after a while, the two sisters quarrelled bitterly, and I had the very unpleasant experience of living for a whole year in the same house with two relatives who neither saw nor spoke to each other.

We spent the winter at the beginning of 1838 in a very small dingy dwelling in the old town; it was not till the spring that we moved into a pleasanter house in the more salubrious Petersburg suburb, where, in spite of the sisterly breach before referred to, we led a fairly bright and cheerful life, as we were often able to entertain many of our friends and acquaintances in a simple though pleasant fashion.  In addition to members of the stage I knew a few people in the town, and we received and visited the family of Dorn, the musical director, with whom I became quite intimate.  But it was the second musical director, Franz Lobmann, a very worthy though not a very gifted man, who became most faithfully attached to me.  However, I did not cultivate many acquaintances in wider circles, and they grew fewer as the ruling passion of my life grew steadily stronger; so that when, later on, I left Riga, after spending nearly two years there, I departed almost as a stranger, and with as much indifference as I had left Magdeburg and Konigsberg.  What, however, specially embittered my departure was a series of experiences of a particularly disagreeable nature, which firmly determined me to cut myself off entirely from the necessity of mixing with any people like those I had met with in my previous attempts to create a position for myself at the theatre.