town of Kaaden the rector of the school was
able to allot them a room--just a bare, unfurnished chamber, in which
they were permitted to settle. Such teaching as Butzbach received was
spasmodic and ineffectual, and after two years of this bondage he ran
away. For the next five years he was in Bohemia in private service,
longing for home, hating his durance among the heathen, as he called
the Bohemians for following John Hus, but lacking courage to make his
escape from masters who could send horsemen to scour the countryside
for fugitive servants and string them up to trees when caught.
However, at length the opportunity came, and after varying fortunes,
Butzbach made his way home to Miltenberg, to find his father dead and
his mother married again.

For the substantial accuracy of Butzbach's narrative his character is
sufficient warranty. He was a pious, honest man, and at the time when
he wrote his autobiography at the request of his half-brother Philip,
he was already a monk at Laach. But the picture of a young student's
sufferings under an elder's cruelty can be paralleled with surprising
closeness from the autobiography of Thomas Platter, mentioned above;
the wandering from one school to another, the maltreatment, the
begging, the enforced stealing, all these are reproduced with just the
difference of surroundings.

Platter's account of his life at Breslau is worth quoting. 'I was ill
three times in one winter, so that they were obliged to bring me into
the hospital; for the travelling scholars had a particular hospital
and physicians for themselves. Care was taken of the patients, and
they had good beds, only the vermin were so abundant that, like many
others, I lay much rather upon the floor than in the beds. Through the
winter the fags lay upon the floor in the school, but the Bacchants in
small chambers, of which at St. Elizabeth's there were several
hundreds. But in summer, when it was hot, we lay in the church-yard,
collected together grass such as is spread in summer on Saturdays in
the gentlemen's streets before the doors, and lay in it like pigs in
the straw. When it rained, we ran into the school, and when there was
thunder, we sang the whole night with the Subcantor, responses and
other sacred music. Now and then after supper in summer we went into
the beerhouses to beg for beer. The drunken Polish peasants would give
us so much that I often could not find my way to the school again,
though only a stone