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THE HARDEST TIME IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE.
The period which now followed was the most terrible of my whole life.
Even the faithful love that surrounded me could do little to relieve it.
Medicines did not avail, and I had not yet found the arcanum which afterwards so greatly benefitted my suffering soul.
The props which my mother and Middendorf had bestowed upon me when a boy had fallen; and the feeling of convalescence, which gives the invalid's life a sense of bliss the healthy person rarely knows, could not aid me, for the disease increased with wonderful speed.
When autumn came I was so much worse that Geheimrath von Ammon, a learned and experienced physician, recalled his advice that my mother and I should spend the winter in the south.

The journey would have been fatal.

The correctness of his judgment was proved by the short trip to Berlin which I took with my mother, aided by my brother Martin, who was then a physician studying with the famous clinical doctor Schonlein.

It was attended with cruel suffering and the most injurious results, but it was necessary for me to return to my comfortable winter quarters.