At that time a cheerful tone prevailed in the family, the sons having a brighter future in prospect than their fathers, whose academic course had been hindered by State regulations.
A liberal table was kept in the house; everything was of the best quality, and there was plenty of it. The servants managed the house and were allowed a free hand in everything; they were not regarded as servants. The housemaid was a pietist and allowed to be so, as much as she pleased. She was good-natured and humorous, and, illogically enough, adopted the jesting tone of the cheerful paganism which reigned in the house. On the other hand, no one laughed at her belief. John himself was treated as an intimate friend and a child alternately and lived with the boys. His work was easy and he was rather required to keep the boys company than to give them lessons. Meanwhile he became somewhat "spoiled" as people, who have the usual idea of keeping youth in the background, call it. Though only nineteen, he was received on an equal footing among well-known and mature artists, doctors, _littérateurs_ and officials. He became accustomed to regard himself as grown up, and therefore the set-backs he encountered afterwards, were the harder to bear.
His medical career began with chemical experiments in the technological institute. There he obtained a closer view of some of the glories he had dreamed of in his childhood. But how dry and tedious were the rudiments of science! To stand and pour acids on salts and to watch the solution change colour, was not pleasant; to produce salts from two or more solutions was not very interesting. But later on, when the time came for analysis, the mysterious part began. To fill a glass about the size of a punch-bowl with a liquid as clear as water and then to exhibit in the filter the possibly twenty elements it contained,--this really seemed like penetrating into nature's secrets. When he was alone in the laboratory he made small experiments on his own account, and it was not long before with some danger he had prepared a little phial of prussic acid. To have death enclosed in a few drops under a glass stopper was a curiously pleasant feeling.
At the same time he studied zoology, anatomy, botany, physic and Latin,--still more Latin! To read and master a subject was congenial to him, but to learn by heart he hated. His head was already filled with so many subjects, that it was hard for anything more to enter, but it was obliged to.