Digitised Manuscripts and Books

dance. But whether from diffidence or pride, he refused to accede to her request. My Sister, however, would not be baulked, and as she remembered every note of the tune she sent for the band-master, played it over to him and made him take it down. Shortly afterwards the Count had the questionable satisfaction of dancing with my Sister to the strains of his own polka.

For many years my parents had but one residence, their town house, and when they wanted a change they went to France or England. In the hot summer months, and the summer at Frankfort is often terribly hot, we children were sent to the Neuhof, our farm in the vicinity of the town, where rooms of the most primitive simplicity were prepared for us. Fresh milk and cream and good butter were not easily procured at Frankfort, and to remedy the deficiency my Mother set up a dairy at the Neuhof and imported a Devonshire dairymaid. In the orchard adjoining the buildings five small plots of ground were fenced in and laid out as gardens for my three Sisters, my Brother and myself; and to these we attended with much zeal and gravity, though were it not for the assistance of the gardener it may be questioned whether they would have produced anything but weeds.

Early in the ‘forties’ my Great-Uncle Anselm, with whom my Father was a great favourite, gave him twenty acres of land, a slice from his own farm some two or three miles outside the town, and my Grandfather provided the funds to erect a house upon it. A French architect made the designs for the villa, and the foundation stone was laid in 1845 amid great rejoicings. Newspapers and coins were duly laid in the stone, which we all struck with a mallet, even my younger Brother Albert, then only a baby in arms. We first took up our residence at the Grünebourg, as the villa was called from the name of the farm, in 1847 and soon we all loved the place. My Mother who was a great adept at gardening took no small pleasure and pride in laying out the grounds, planting young chestnut trees on each side of the road which led from the farm past our gates towards the town. The twenty acres were made into flower gardens and orchards, with an aviary, and a pond which was stocked with carp and adorned with ducks. There was a mound which we called ‘the mountain’ in a remote corner containing the ice-house, and close by were enclosures for a wild antelope and a tame deer that my Father had brought from Egypt. It was all on a small scale but to us it seemed enormous.

The house, however, was very large and its proportions were perfect. It was built of red stone with cream coloured panels somewhat like the Duke of Nassau’s castle at Biebrich on the Rhine, and was the first private house in that style – since then it has been copied by the score. Internally it was decorated in the French Louis XV manner, then an altogether new departure from the fashion of the day; an innovation, too, which was soon repeatedly imitated. My mother had taken the idea from a Pompadour bed she had seen in Paris.