“I liked measuring my bodily strength with that of others in a friendly tussle. One day on the way home from school I had a wrestle with George Nitschelm —he is now under the ground—who was bigger than I, and was supposed to be stronger, but I got him down. While he was lying under me, he jerked out, ‘Yes, if I got broth to eat twice a week, as you do, I should be as strong as you are!’ I staggered home, overcome by this finish to our play. George Nitschelm had, with cruel plainness, declared what I had already been obliged to feel on other occasions: the village boys did not accept me as one of themselves. I was to them one who was better off than they were, the parson’s son, a sprig of the gentry. The certainty of this caused me much suffering, for I wanted to be exactly like them, and not a bit better off. The broth became nauseous to me; whenever I saw it steaming on the table I could hear George Nitschelm’s voice.

“So I now watched most carefully to see that I did not make myself in any way different from the others. For winter wear I had been given an overcoat made out of an old one of my father’s. But no village-boy wore an overcoat, and when the tailor was fitting it on and said, ‘By Jove, Albert, now you’re a regular gentleman!’ it cost me a big effort to keep back the tears. The day I was to wear it for the first time—it was for church on a Sunday morning—I refused point-blank, and there was an unpleasant scene. My father gave me a box on the ear, but that did no good. They had to take me to church without the overcoat, and every time I was expected to wear it, it was the same tale over again. What a number of times I got the stick over this new garment! But I stood firm.

“That same winter my mother took me to Strassburg to visit an elderly relative, and she wished to use the visit as an opportunity for buying me a cap. In a fine big shop they tried several on me, and at last my mother and the shopwoman agreed on a handsome sailor’s cap which I was to take for my own. But they had reckoned without their host. The cap displeased me altogether, because no village boy wore a sailor’s cap. When they went on pressing me to take this one or that one from among all those they had tried on me, I got into such a passion that everybody in the shop ran up to us.

‘Well, what sort of a cap do you want, you stupid lad?’ the shop-woman shouted at me. ‘I won’t have one of your new-fashioned ones; I’ll have one like what the village boys wear.’ So a shop-girl was sent out, and she brought me from the unsaleable stock a brown cap that one could pull down over one’s ears. Beaming with joy, I put it on, while my poor mother had to put up with some cutting remarks and some contemptuous glances on account of her young duffer. It hurt me that she had been put to shame before the townspeople.”

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