to you at the
same time. Still, this should not lead you to ostentation and pride,
which are contrary to all Christian feeling. In the first place, it was
hardly right in you to set yourself above all the other masters at the
meeting to-day as you did. Very likely you do know more of your craft
than all the rest of them put together; but to go and cast this
straight in their teeth could only give rise to anger and annoyance.
And then your conduct of this evening; you surely could not have been
so blind as not to see that what Spangenberg was driving at was to find
out how far your headstrong pride would really carry you. It could not
but have hurt the worthy gentleman sorely to hear you attribute any
young noble's wooing of your daughter to mere greed for your money. And
it would have all been well enough if you had got back into the right
road when he began to talk about his own son. If you had said, 'Ah, my
good and honoured sir, if you were to come with your son to ask for my
daughter (an honour on which, certainly, I could never have reckoned),
I should waver in the firmness of my determination.' If you had said
that, what would have been the consequence, but that old Spangenberg,
quite forgetting his previous wrongs, would have smiled, and got back
into the fine temper he was in before."

"Scold me well," said Master Martin; "I deserve it, I know. But when
the old gentleman spoke such non sense, I really could not bring myself
to give him any other answer."

"Then," Paumgartner continued, "this silly notion of yours that you
won't give your daughter to anybody but a cooper. Was ever such
nonsense heard of? You say your daughter's destiny shall be left in
God's hands, and yet you go and wrest it out of God's hands yourself,
by deciding that you will choose your son-in-law out of one limited
circle. This may be the very destruction of both her and you. Leave off
such unchristian, childish folly, Master Martin. Commit the matter to
the Almighty. He will place the right decision in your daughter's pious
heart."

"Ah, my dear sir," said Master Martin quite dejectedly, "I see now, for
the first time, how wrong I was not to make a clean breast of the whole
business at once. You, of course, suppose that it is merely my high
opinion of the cooper's craft which makes me resolve never to give Rosa
to anybody but a master cooper. But that is by no means the case; there
is another reason. I can't let you go away until I hav