



Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive





gutcheck/gutspell/jeebes/ and spell check run



Transcriber's Note:
   1. Page scan source:
      http://www.archive.org/details/childrenworld00heysgoog

   2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].





[Illustration: Portrait of Paul Heyse.]






                            THE CHILDREN OF

                               THE WORLD



                                   BY

                               PAUL HEYSE



   "The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the
                          children of light."



                                NEW YORK
                     WORTHINGTON CO., 747 BROADWAY
                                  1890





                          Copyright, 1889, By
                            WORTHINGTON CO.





                             Barr-Dinwiddie
                     Printing and Book-Binding Co.,
                           Jersey City, N. J.





                       THE CHILDREN OF THE WORLD.





                                 BOOK I.




                               CHAPTER I.


A few years ago, in the Dorotheen-strasse, in the midst of the Latin
Quarter of Berlin, whose quiet, student-like appearance threatens to
become effaced by the growing elegance of the capital, a small, narrow,
unpretending two-story house, stood humbly, as if intimidated, between
its broad-shouldered neighbors, though every year it received a washing
of a delicate pink hue, and recently had even had a new lightning-rod
affixed to its ancient gable roof. The owner, an honest master
shoemaker, had in the course of time accumulated money enough to have
comfortably established himself in a new and far more elegant dwelling,
but he had experienced beneath this sharply sloping roof, all the
blessings of his life and though a man by no means given to sentimental
weaknesses, he would have thought it base ingratitude to turn his back,
without good reason