Like every one who loves Nature and flowers, he was fond of children.  We called him “Uncle Lenne,” and often walked down our street hand in hand with him.

It is well known that the part of the city on the other side of the Potsdam Gate was called the “Geheimerath-Quarter.”  Our street, it is true, lay nearer to the Brandenburg Gate, yet it really belonged to that section; for there was not a single house without at least one Geheimerath (Privy Councillor).

Yet this superabundance of men in “secret” positions lent no touch of mystery to our cheerful street, shaded by the green of the forest.  Franker, gayer, sometimes noisier children than its residents could not be found in Berlin.  I was only a little fellow when we lived there, and merely tolerated in the “big boys’” sports, but it was a festival when, with Ludo, I could carry their provisions for them or even help them make fireworks.  The old Rechnungsrath, who lived in the house owned by Geheimerath Crede, the father of my Leipsic colleague, was their instructor in this art, which was to prove disastrous to my oldest brother and bright Paul Seiffart; for—­may they pardon me the treachery—­they took one of the fireworks to school, where—­I hope accidentally—­it went off.  At first this caused much amusement, but strict judgment followed, and led to my mother’s resolution to send her oldest son away from home to some educational institution.

The well-known teacher, Adolph Diesterweg, whose acquaintance she had made at the house of a friend, recommended Keilhau, and so our little band was deprived of the leader to whom Ludo and I had looked up with a certain degree of reverence on account of his superior strength, his bold spirit of enterprise, and his kindly condescension to us younger ones.

After his departure the house was much quieter, but we did not forget him; his letters from Keilhau were read aloud to us, and his descriptions of the merry school days, the pedestrian tours, and sleigh-rides awakened an ardent longing in Ludo and myself to follow him.

Yet it was so delightful with my mother, the sun around which our little lives revolved!  I had no thought, performed no act, without wondering what would be her opinion of it; and this intimate relation, though in an altered form, continued until her death.  In looking backward I may regard it as a law of my whole development that my conduct was regulated according to the more or less close mental and outward connection in which I stood with her.  The storm and stress period, during which my effervescent youthful spirits led me into all sorts of follies, was the only time in my life in which this close connection threatened to be loosened.  Yet Fate provided that it should soon be welded more firmly than ever.  When she died, a beloved wife stood by my side, but she was part of myself; and in my mother Fate seemed to have robbed me of the supreme arbitrator, the high court of justice, which alone could judge my acts.