but he walked straight
on until noon, without looking back. Then he lay down under a blossoming
apple-tree, to rest and eat some lunch, but the lunch did not taste well;
and when he shut his eyes he could not sleep, for he thought constantly
of Florette. Of course! He had parted from her far too soon, and an eager
longing seized upon him for the young girl, with her red lips and
luxuriant hair. This hair was a perfect golden-yellow; he knew it well,
for she had often combed and braided it in the tavern-room beside the
straw where they all slept.

He yearned to hear her laugh too, and would have liked to see her weep
again.

Then he remembered the desolate smithy in the narrow market-place and the
dreary home, recollected that he was thirty years old, and still had no
wife.

A little wife of his own! A wife like Florette! Seventeen years old, a
complexion like milk and blood, a creature full of gayety and joyous
life! True, he was no light-hearted lad, but, lying under the apple-tree
in the month of May, he saw himself in imagination living happily and
merrily in the smithy by the market-place, with the fair-haired girl who
had already shed tears for him. At last he started up, and because he had
determined to go still farther on this day, did so, though for no other
reason than to carry out the plan formed the day before. The next
morning, before sunrise, he was again marching along the highway, this
time not forward towards the Black Forest, but back to Nordlingen.

That very evening Florette became his betrothed bride, and the following
Tuesday his wife.

The wedding was celebrated in the midst of the turmoil of the fair.
Strolling players, jugglers and buffoons were the witnesses, and there
was no lack of music and tinsel.

A quieter ceremony would have been more agreeable to the plain citizen
and sensible blacksmith, but this purgatory had to be passed to reach
Paradise.

On Wednesday he went off in a fair wagon with his young wife, and in
Stuttgart bought with a portion of his savings many articles of household
furniture, less to stop the gossips' tongues, of which he took no heed,
than to do her honor in his own eyes. These things, piled high in a wagon
of his own, he had sent into his native town as Florette's dowry, for her
whole outfit consisted of one pink and one grass-green gown, a lute and a
little white dog.

A delightful life now began in the smithy for Adam. The gossips avoided
his wife, but t