Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/48

 owed more happy hours than to any other one book. I can still see it before me, as I grasped it eagerly as soon as school hours were over; I can see the worn edges of the binding, the woodcuts, even the inkspot which to my extreme annoyance disfigured one of them; and I can still hear myself telling the schoolmaster about the wonderful contents of this book and begging him to read it aloud to the class, which he did on two afternoons in the week, his own interest increasing so much with every reading that the hours gradually lengthened, to the detriment of other studies. Next to “Robinson Crusoe” came the “Landwehrmann,” a popular history of the war of liberation in 1813, for which my interest had been excited by my grandfather's and my father's reminiscences, and from the reading of which I emerged a fiery German patriot. And finally I was led up to higher literature by my father's reading aloud to me while I was ill with the measles some of Schiller's poems, and even the “Robbers.”

There were still other stimulating family influences. My mother had four brothers. The oldest, “Ohm Peter,” as we children called him, had served in a French regiment of grenadiers during the last years of Napoleon's reign, and was rich in recollections of that eventful period. The wars over, he married the daughter of a halfen and became himself the halfen of a large estate in Lind, near Cologne. In body and mind he resembled my grandfather, and we children loved him heartily. The second was “Ohm Ferdinand.” He was the superintendent of extensive peatworks belonging to Count Metternich, and lived in Liblar in comfortable circumstances. He had risen in the Prussian military service to the dignity of a “Landwehrlieutenant,” and when he turned out at the periodical musters in his fine uniform, a sword at his side and a “tschako” with a high bunch of feathers on his head, we children looked at him