Her name was Babette Meyer, now Countess Palckreuth.

She lived in our neighbourhood, and was a charming, graceful child, but not one of our acquaintances.
When she was grown up--we were good friends then--she told me she was coming from school one winter day, and some boys threw snowballs at her.
Then Ludo and I appeared--"the Ebers boys" and she thought that would be the end of her; but instead of attacking her we fell upon the boys, who turned upon us, and drove them away, she escaping betwixt Scylla and Charybdis.
Before this praiseworthy deed we had, however, thrown snow at a young lady in wanton mischief.

I forgive our heedlessness as we were forgiven, but it is really a painful thought to me that we should have snowballed a poor insane man, well known in the Thiergarten and Lennestrasse, and who seriously imagined that he was made of glass.
I began to relate this, thinking of our uproarious laughter when the poor fellow cried out: "Let me alone! I shall break! Don't you hear me clink ?" Then I stopped, for my heart aches when I reflect what terrible distress our thoughtlessness caused the unfortunate creature.

We were not bad-hearted children, and yet it occurred to none of us to put ourselves in the place of the whimpering man and think what he suffered.
But we could not do it.

A child is naturally egotistical, and unable in such a case to distinguish between what is amusing and what is sad.
Had the cry, "It hurts me!" once fallen from the trembling lips of the "glass man," I think we should have thrown nothing more at him.
But our young hearts did not, under all circumstances, allow what amused us to cast kinder feelings into the shade.