Except at lunchtime, we, my brothers and sisters and I, saw little of our father all day.  Perhaps he was very busy.  After supper, which was, in accordance with the old custom, served as early as seven o'clock, all of us, our mother as well, went into our father's study and sat around a table.  Our father smoked and drank a large glass of beer.  Often he told us strange stories and became so excited over them that his pipe went out and I had to relight it for him with a burning spill, which I found a great source of amusement.  But often he handed us picture books, sat silent and motionless in his armchair, and blew out thick clouds of smoke, so that we were all enveloped as if by a fog.  On such evenings our mother became very gloomy, and the clock had hardly struck nine before she said: "Now, children, to bed, to bed!  The sandman is coming."  On these occasions I really did hear something come clumping up the stairs with slow, heavy tread, and knew it must be the sandman.  Once these muffled footsteps seemed to me especially frightening, and I asked my mother as she led us out: "Mama, who is this sandman who always drives us away from Papa?  What does he look like?"  "There is no sandman, my dear child," my mother replied.  "When I say the sandman is coming, all that means is that you are sleepy and cannot keep your eyes open, as though someone had sprinkled sand into them."  My mother's answer did not content me; and in my childish mind there unfolded the idea that she had denied the sandman's existence only so that we should not be afraid of him, for I continued to hear him coming up the stairs.  Bursting with curiosity to learn more about this sandman, and of his connections with us children, I at last asked the old woman who looked after my youngest sister what sort of a man a sandman was.  "Oh Nat," she replied, "don't you know that yet?  It is a wicked man who comes after children when they won't go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their head all bloody, and then he throws them into his sack and carries them to the crescent moon as food for his little children, who have their nest up there and have crooked beaks like owls and peck up the eyes of the naughty children."  The image of the cruel sandman now assumed hideous detail within me, and when I heard the sound of clumping coming up the stairs in the evening I trembled with fear and terror.  My mother could get nothing out of me but the cry "The sandman! the sandman!" stammered out in tears.  I was the first to run into the bedroom on the nights he was coming, and his fearsome apparition tormented me till dawn.  I was already old enough to realize that the tale the old woman had told me of the children's nest in the moon could not be true; nevertheless, the sandman himself remained a dreadful spectre; and I was seized with especial horror whenever I heard him not merely come up the stairs but wrench open the door of my father's study and go into it.  There were times when he stayed away for many nights; then he would come all the more frequently, night after night.  This continued for some years, but never could I accustom myself to the uncanny ghost: the image of the cruel sandman never grew paler within me.  What it could be that he had to do with my father began to engage my imagination more and more.  An invincible timidity prevented me from asking my father about it; but to investigate the mystery myself, to see the fabled sandman myself - this desire grew more and more intense as the years passed.  The sandman had started me on the road to the strange and adventurous that so easily find a home in the heart of a child.  I liked nothing more than to read or listen to gruesome tales of kobolds, witches, dwarfs, and so on; but over all of them there towered the sandman, and I used to draw the strangest and most hideous pictures of him on tables, cupboards and walls everywhere in the house.  ********* 

Can you understand, Lothar, the true inwardness of this adventure? A raging fever took hold of me, and for six weeks I hovered between life and death: in my delirious fits I always imagined I saw the sandman in the shape and features of Coppelius. But that is not the most terrible part of my story. Listen again. For a year nobody had seen Coppelius, and everyone thought he had left the town. Little by little my father had recovered his cheerful spirits and his customary ways of tranquillity and paternal affection. But one night, as nine o'clock struck from the neighbouring belfry, we heard the door of the house creak on its hinges, and footsteps as heavy as a hammer on the anvil began to come upstairs. "It is Coppelius!" said my mother, turning pale. "Yes, it is Coppelius." repeated my father brokenly, and sinister visions flocked upon me on every hand. *********