overs to match these for
light-heartedness and goodly mien. Some few happy and glad days were at
that time vouchsafed to them in the old well-known forest; but on the
ride home Margery's palfrey stumbled close without the city gates on the
frozen ground. Her arm-bone was badly broken and her right hand remained
so stiff, notwithstanding Master Hartmann Knorr's best skill, that she
could no more use the pen save with great pain, albeit she often after
this rode on horseback. Thus the little book lay aside for a long space;
and while she was yet diligently striving to write with her left hand
death snatched from her Ann Schopper, the widow of our late dear brother
Herdegen Schopper and her heart's best friend, and this fell upon her
soul as so cruel a grief that she never after could endure to take up
the pen.

Then, when she lost her dearly-beloved husband, a few months after their
golden wedding day, all was at an end for her; the brave old woman gave
up all care for life, and died no more than three months after him. And
indeed often have I seen how that, when one of a pair, who have dwelt
together so many years in true union of hearts, departs this life, this
earth is too lonely for the other, so that one might deem that their
hearts had grown to be as it were one flesh, and the one that is left
hath bled to death inwardly from the Reaper's stroke.

Then I read through this book of memories once more, and meseemed that
Margery had written of herself as less worthy than of a truth she was in
her life's spring-tide.

Most of you can yet remember how that my lord the Mayor spoke of the
bride with the golden chaplet crowning her thick silver hair, as
the pride of our city, the best friend and even at times the wisest
counsellor of our worshipful Council, the comforter and refuge of the
poor; and you know full well that Master Johannes Lochner, the priest,
spoke over her open grave, saying that, as in her youth she had been
fairest, so in old age she was the noblest and most helpful of all the
dames of the parish of Saint Sebald; and you yourselves have many a time
been her almoners, or have gazed in silence to admire her portrait.

And at Venice I have heard from the lips of the very master who limned
her, and who was one of the greatest painters of the famous guild to
which he belonged, that such as she had he imagined the stately queen
of some ancient German King defeated by the Romans, or Eve herself, if
indeed one