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Among such associations the first ten years of my life were passed. We studied hard, but we played hard, too. Nor were our muscles forgotten: we were given regular exercises, and great was my pride when I passed the “swimming test” one summer’s day, by holding my own for the prescribed half hour against the Rhine current and so winning the right to wear the magic letters R. S.—“Rhine-Swimmer”—on my bathing suit. Life was indeed gemütlich in the Mannheim of that period.

It was not long, however, before the faraway world of America began to knock at our quiet door. A brother of my father had joined the gold rush to the Pacific and settled in San Francisco; he wrote us tales of the wild, free life of California, its adventures and its wealth. Strange gifts came back from him—a cane for the Grand Duke, its head a piece of gold-bearing quartz; for us children queer mementoes of an existence that seemed all romance. From time to time, this “Gold-Uncle,” as we called him, gave American friends touring Europe letters of introduction to my father, and these visitors enhanced the charm of the United States. One such especially filled our minds with narratives of easily won riches; Captain Richardson, a bearded Forty-niner, whose accounts of the land of opportunity were so much more moving than our fairy tales as to affect even my father’s mature fancy.