I inquired whether the old host was still there. He came out in brown knee-breeches and jacket and cap over his white hair, and I told him of our former visit. Without a word he went for the visitor's book, and turned back to 1844, and pointed to the entry: "Mr. Baring-Gould and Family." Only one other Englishman had visited the inn since, and he was not an Englishman but a Scotchman, Sir Matthew Begbie, who had gone to the Krone at my father's recommendation.
After having visited old scenes, my wife and I went to Nürnberg, and next morning I started off in quest of Gretchen, who, I had learned, was married to a grocer named Pichelmeyer. I found the shop, but the day being one of market it was half full of Franconian peasantesses making purchases. I waited awhile, till a middle-aged woman behind the counter turned to me and asked how she could serve me. "Only with your memory," said I. "Do you remember a little boy of ten, when you were aged eight, at Muggendorf, to whom, on his leaving, you presented a pinchbeck ring with a bit of blue glass in it?"
"Herr Je!" she exclaimed. "Do you mean to say that it is your very self?"
So my wife sat down on a sack of split peas, and Herr Pichelmeyer on one of coffee-grains, and they looked sadly at each other, while Gretchen and I recalled old times. Then, suddenly, she dashed forth to fetch her little daughter Anna, and presented her to me. The child was the living image of what her mother had been nigh on thirty years before, and I seemed to have slipped back into the past whilst looking at Gretchen's child. I did not tell Frau Pichelmeyer that I had long ago lost the pinchbeck ring that she had given me when I was an urchin of ten and she a little maid of eight. I have some reason to suppose that my wife found the air fresher outside the shop, and I think that I heard the Herr Spezereihädler Pichelmeyer draw a sigh of relief when my back was turned.
At the end of the summer, in August, 1844, we left Germany and returned to England.
That Christmas of 1844 witnessed the issue of Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol. It had an enormous sale. Six thousand copies were disposed of at once, and there ensued six further editions
