ord be
praised.'

"If the Lord will only keep us all in good health now! The Lord has
always been very gracious to me: as far as the cattle go, I haven't
lost one of them yet. There's nothing I like to think of more than that
the cattle always have plenty to eat here. To the last day of my life I
shall never forget what a misery it was when feed was so scarce, just
the day before I went to Stuttgard, when there wasn't hardly a blade of
grass on the ground. Do you remember what it used to be to get up in
the morning and not give the poor beasts a quarter of a good breakfast,
and then to see the flesh falling off their ribs? I often felt so unked
I could have run away. Here the cows run about pasturing all the year
round, and never know what it is to want; and yet I never had to kill
one of them for having overeaten itself. Over there they stand in
the stable all the year round, and then, when they do get into a
clover-field, they eat till they burst. And just as it is with the
cattle, so it is with men. Over there they have to stand in a stable,
tied down by squires and clerks and office-holders, until their talons
get so long that they can't walk any more, and the minute you let 'em
out they go capering about like mad. This is what somebody was saying
very finely in a public meeting the other day. Mother, it's a fine
thing, a public meeting: it's just as if you were to go to church. And
yet it isn't just so, neither; for everybody may speak there that can
and likes: all are equal there. I want to tell you how they do it, and
yet I believe I can't, exactly: only I must tell you that our Matthew
is one of the principal speakers: they've put him on the committee two
or three times, and the name of Matthew Schorer is one for which the
people have respect. I have spoken in public once or twice too. I don't
know how it is; at first my heart thumped a little, but then I just
felt as if I was speaking to you, just free 'from the liver,' as we
used to say in Germany. What they were disputing about was, a German, a
Wurtemberger, or, as we say over here, a Swobe,[11] came here, and he'd
been an officer, and the king had pardoned him; he'd got up a
conspiracy among the military, and afterward he betrayed all his
comrades: here he gave himself out for a friend of freedom; but a
letter came from over there to say that he was too bad for the gallows,
and the devil had kicked him out of his cart. So they disputed about it
for a long t