The Specter-Island, the lovely, Lay dim in the moon’s mild glance; There sounded sweetest music, There waved the shadowy dance. It sounded sweeter and sweeter, It waved there to and fro; But we slid past forlornly Upon the great sea-flow. - Heinrich Heine, translated by James Thomson “Look! Why don’t they trim their sail?” Uncle Hessie looked toward the small sloop perhaps one hundred meters to our starboard side. It was the morning after our arrival in Caputh. We were out on the lake early to sail. The boat Hessie was looking at with the floppy sails was Einstein’s Tümmler, which means “porpoise.” Professor Einstein was at the tiller and Papa was his crew. I was at the tiller of my boat. Like Einstein’s, mine was a sloop, single-masted, same class—a “snipe”—fourteen feet in length. My boat was called Ratty. People always teased me because it was such an ugly name. But it was the nickname of River Rat, one of my favorite characters from one of my favorite books, The Wind in the Willows, who just loved to mess around in boats.
