In the village an ancient barrow had its story of a robber
knight who had buried his favourite child there in a golden cradle;
and near by was the old castle of Henning von Holstein, who, when
besieged by the Duke of Mecklenburg, had buried his treasures close
to the keep of his stronghold. On such romantic legends Schliemann's
young imagination was nourished. By the time he was ten years old
he had produced a Latin essay on the Trojan War. Such things, which
in another might have been mere childish precocities, were in him
the indications of an enthusiasm for antiquity, which was destined
to be the ruling passion of his whole life.
Yet the beginnings of his career in the world were unromantic to
the last degree. His father's poverty forced him to give up the hope
of a learned life, and at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed
to a small grocer in a country village, in whose employment, surely
uncongenial enough for such a spirit, he spent five and a half
years, selling butter, herrings, potato-brandy and the like, and
occupying his spare moments in tidying out the little shop. Even in
such circumstances his passion for the Homeric story found means,
sufficiently quaint, for its gratification. There came one evening
to the shop a miller's man, who had been well educated, but had
fallen into poor circumstances, and had taken to drink, yet even
in his degradation had not forgotten his Homer.
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