his own hand, and Dame Giovanna had much
pains to carry away the child, who had cast himself on the old man with
passionate love. Everything that moved the little one's soul he was
forced, as it were, to express with unreasoning violence; and now, when
the child was so boisterous as to disturb the peace of the others, his
mother took him by the hand to lead him away into another chamber; but
the dying man signed to him with a look which none may describe, and that
moment the little fellow set his teeth hard and stood in silence by the
door. Whereupon the old man nodded to him as though the child had done
him some kindness.

Then he shut his eyes for a good while, and presently asked for some of
the fine Bacharach wine which Cousin Maud had sent him; but his voice
could scarce be heard. Ann reached him the glass, and at a sign from him
she tasted of it; then he drank it with much comfort while Dame Giovanna
held him sitting. The old, sweet smile was on his lips, and as he yet
held the stem of the glass with a shaking hand, and suffered that I
should help him, he cried in a clear voice: "Once more, Prosit, Elsie!
You have waited long enough up there for your old man. And Prosit,
likewise, to my dear old home, the fair city of Nuremberg." Then he took
breath and added according to his wont: "Prosit, Adam! Thanks, Heyden!"
And emptied the cup which I tilted up for him, to the very bottom. Then,
when he fell back and gazed before him in silence, I found speech, and
noted, albeit it struck me in truth as somewhat strange, that he bore our
good town in mind then, in drinking his old pledge. Hereupon he nodded
kindly and added, with an enquiring glance at the churchwarden: "It is
rightly the duty of every true Christian man to pray for all mankind!
Well, well; but they are so many, so infinitely many; and I, like every
other man, have my own little world, inside the great world, as it were,
and that is my dear old, staunch town of Nuremberg. Never have I been
beyond its precincts, and it contains all on earth that is dear and
precious to me. To me the citizens of Nuremberg are all mankind, and our
city and so much as the eye can see from this tower all my world, small
though it may be. I could ever find some good matter for thought in
Nuremberg, something noble and well-compact, a fine whole. I have never
sought the boundaries of the other, greater world."

Yet, that his world was in truth wider than he weened, was plain to us