It is an April morning in 1844, in the town of Leipzig, —calm, cool, and fraught with exquisite promise of a prolific spring, —when the Herr Professor Doctor Robert Schumann, rising before six o'clock as is his wont, very quietly and noiselessly in his soft felt slippers, dresses and goes downstairs. For he does not wish to disturb or incommode his sleeping wife, whose dark eyes are still closed, or to awaken any of his three little children.
