Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/54

 and ornamented, and the entrance had a porte cochère, jutting out into the street. At the time of which I write the house was empty and dilapidated, and we village children tore up and down its rickety stairs and passageways and found its vacant rooms, with their dark corners, well adapted for hide-and-seek and robber plays.

This uncanny place interested me deeply, and from Master George I learned that its last owners and occupants had been two old bachelors by the name of Krupp, then long dead. The older of the two, so Master George told me, was a very peculiar gentleman. He wore his hair braided in a cue and on his head an old-fashioned three-cornered hat. He had but one eye and he wore spectacles with only one glass. These were sewed to the front corner of his hat so that the one glass should drop into place over the one eye the instant that he put his hat upon his head. He possessed a large library and was a very learned man. He would often wander through the village street, absorbed in thought, his hands behind his back, not noticing anyone. He never went to church, and before he died refused to receive extreme unction. Krupp, so Master George always wound up his talk about him, was “a true philosopher.” I asked my father whether this queer man had really been a philosopher. My father thought so beyond a doubt. This, then, was my first conception of a philosopher, and frequently in late life, when I heard philosophy and philosophers spoken of, has the picture of the three-cornered hat with the one-eyed spectacle attached to it risen up in my mind.

Master George had strange peculiarities. One day, while he was entertaining a company with amusing talk, which kept his hearers in the merriest mood, he suddenly heard a clock strike. Master George stopped abruptly in the middle of the sentence, jumped to his feet, exclaiming in a solemn