The Landgrave was able to quiet his conscience by forbidding his own subjects to stake at the tables. Anyone of them who did so was fined for the first offence fifty gulden, for the second, one hundred, and for the third offence was sent to prison. The informer received half the fine. It was the same at Schwalbach, Schlangenbad and Wiesbaden. The Duke of Nassau generally managed to put a man with a title at the head of the gambling-tables; at Schwalbach was the Baron Fechenbach, and a Baron Wellins ran those at Wiesbaden. There were gambling-tables also at Wilhelmsthal and Neuheim. It was tempting to the subjects of Hesse-Homburg and Nassau to see strangers pocket gold napoleons, and there was generally a Jew at hand to negotiate an evasion of the law. Some of the subjects of these benevolent princes came to ruin by such underhand means. Predestination was a comforting doctrine. The English, Russian and French gamesters would not come to Homburg, Schwalbach or Weisbaden unless they had been foreordained, before the foundations of the earth were laid, to lose their money at these tables, the money to come into the pockets of their Transparencies the Duke and the Landgrave, and not a little into those of the brothers Blanc, and the Barons Fechenbach and Wellins.
We went on to Mannheim, which we reached on October 14, 1843. My father's object in going thither for the winter was that he had heard of an English school there for boys conducted by a Mr. Lovell. And there I made my first acquaintance with Northern Gods and heroes, through a book on general mythology we had to read. The Gods of Aasgard laid hold of my imagination at once; classic mythology little interested me. Thus originated my devotion to Scandinavia, never to leave me.
My mother wrote on January 5, 1844: "We have not as yet made our début at the Palace, though things are in rapid progress to that desirable end; perhaps through the perversity of my heart, the ratio is exact between the proximity of the honour and my unwillingness to avail myself of it. Mr. Strangeways (the Vice-consul) at first refused to give the needful introduction, saying that he could not interfere with the etiquette at the Baden Court or its Mannheim reflexion. But Edward was not to be put off, and he wrote to Sir George Shee, our Minister at Carlsruhe." The hitch, of course, was due to my father and mother
