A tiny rivulet flowed through our garden; near this rivulet was a little round building, whose gaudy door I had never seen open.
From my earliest days, when I was unable to rise from the ground if once I sat down, the little round building had always been in my mind.
I had always loved it, always feared to be near it; I had so longed to know what might be within it. As a little knickerbockered child I would pick the colored gravel-stones from the mortar, and play with them in the dust; and if perchance one stone struck the iron door, I would run away from the echo the blow produced.
In my older days it was again only around this building that I would mostly play, and would remark that upon its façade were written great letters, on which the ivy, that so actively clambered up the walls, scarcely grew. At that time how I longed to know what those letters could mean!
When the first holiday after I had made the acquaintance of those letters came, and they took me again to our country-seat, one after another I spelled out the ancient letters of the inscription on that mysterious little house, and pieced them together in my mind. But I could not arrive at their meaning; for they were written in some foreign tongue.
Many, many times I wrote those words in the dust even before I understood them:
"NE NOS INDUCAS IN TENTATIONEM."
I strove to reach one year earlier than my school-fellows the so-called "student class," where Latin was taught.
My most elementary acquaintance with the Latin tongue had always for its one aim the discovery of the meaning of that saying. Finally I solved the mystery—
"Lead us not into temptation." It is a sentence of the Lord's Prayer, which I myself had repeated a thousand times; and now I knew its meaning still less than before.