o this work, in which Eva
was to help her, and it would afford her much information; for her aunt
raised many plants which possessed healing power. Some of the seeds or
bulbs had been brought from foreign lands, but she was perfectly familiar
with the virtues of all. Schweinau afforded abundant opportunity to use
them, and the nurses in the city hospital, and the leech Otto, and other
physicians, as well as many noble dames in the neighbourhood who took the
place of a physician among their peasants and dependents, applied to Fran
Christine when they needed certain roots, leaves, berries, and seeds for
their sick. Nor did the monks and nuns, far and near, ever come to her
for such things in vain.

True, the life at Castle Schweinau was by no means so quiet as the one
which Eva had hitherto loved.

When she accepted the invitation she knew that, if she shared all her
aunt's occupations, she would not have even a single half hour of her
own; but this was not her first visit here, and she had learned that Frau
Christine allowed her entire liberty, and required nothing which she did
not offer of her own free will.

When she saw the matron, after the mass and the early repast which her
husband shared with her before going to the city, visit the aged widows
of the crusaders in the little institution behind the kitchen garden and
inspect and regulate the work of the Beguines, she often wondered where
this woman, whose age was nearer seventy than sixty, found strength for
all this, as well as the duties which followed. First there were orders
to give in the kitchen that the principal meal, after the vesper bells
had rung, should always win from the master of the house the "Couldn't be
better," which his wife heard with the same pleasure as ever. Then, after
visiting the wash-house, the bleachcry, the linen presses, the cellar,
the garret, and even the beehives to see that everything was in order,
and emerging from the hands of the maid as a well-dressed noblewoman, she
received visit after visit. Members of the patrician families of
Nuremberg arrived; monks and nuns on various errands for their cloisters
and their poor; gentlemen and ladies from ecclesiastical and secular
circles, in both city and country, among them frequently the most
aristocratic attendants of the Reichstag; for she numbered the Burgrave
and his wife among her friends, and when questioned about the Nuremberg
women, the Burgrave Frederick mentioned her as se