At that time he was probably scarcely forty years old, short in stature and very erect, with a shrewd face whose features indicated an iron sternness of character, an impression heightened by the thick, bushy brows which met above his nose.
He himself said that people in Pomerania believed that men with such eyebrows stood in close relations to Satan.

Once, while on his way in a boat from Greifswald to the island of Rugen, the superstitious sailors were on the point of throwing him overboard because they attributed their peril to him as the child of the devil, yet, he added--and he was a thoroughly truthful man--the power which these strange eyebrows gave him over others, and especially over men of humble station, induced them to release him.
But after we had learned what a jovial, indulgent comrade was hidden behind the iron tyrant who gazed so threateningly at us from the black eyes beneath the bushy brows, our timidity vanished, and at last we found it easy enough to induce him to change a resolute "No" into a yielding "Yes." His wife, on the contrary, was precisely his opposite, for she wielded the sceptre in the household with absolute sway, though so fragile a creature that it seemed as if a breath would blow her away.

No one could have been a more energetic housekeeper.

She was as active an assistant to her husband with her pen as with her tongue.

Most of my reports are in her writing.