"I will now give you a picture from Frankfort," said the Moon.
"I especially noticed one building there. It was not the house in
which Goethe was born, nor the old Council House, through whose grated
windows peered the horns of the oxen that were roasted and given to
the people when the emperors were crowned. No, it was a private house,
plain in appearance, and painted green. It stood near the old Jews'
Street. It was Rothschild's house.
"I looked through the open door. The staircase was brilliantly
lighted: servants carrying wax candles in massive silver
candlesticks stood there, and bowed low before an old woman, who was
being brought downstairs in a litter. The proprietor of the house
stood bare-headed, and respectfully imprinted a kiss on the hand of
the old woman. She was his mother. She nodded in a friendly manner
to him and to the servants, and they carried her into the dark
narrow street, into a little house, that was her dwelling. Here her
children had been born, from hence the fortune of the family had
arisen. If she deserted the despised street and the little house,
fortune would also desert her children. That was her firm belief."
The Moon told me no more; his visit this evening was far too
short. But I thought of the old woman in the narrow despised street.
It would have cost her but a word, and a brilliant house would have
arisen for her on the banks of the Thames--a word, and a villa would
have been prepared in the Bay of Naples.
"If I deserted the lowly house, where the fortunes of my sons
first began to bloom, fortune would desert them!" It was a
superstition, but a superstition of such a class, that he who knows
the story and has seen this picture, need have only two words placed
under the picture to make him understand it; and these two words
are: "A mother."