Tells the story of a seventeen-year-old runaway from an old family who enrolls in a school for servants. The Institute is a deeply mysterious place. Jakob, an irrepressibly subversive presence, keeps a journal in which he records his quirky impressions of the school as well as his own quickly changing enthusiasms and uncertainties, deliberations and dreams. And in the end, as the Institute itself dissolves around him like a dream, he steps out boldly to explore still-unimagined worlds