ot take the
indulgence gratis. Wherever he might be, his family ought to go, and he
did not wish to be anywhere that he would not find Juli.

He did not doubt the continued life of the soul after death, but
precisely because he was sure that the gates of paradise would remain
closed to him throughout eternity he would not help to open them for the
dead child. When his imagination tortured him with fancies that mice and
beetles were leaping and running out of his pockets and the breast of
his doublet, he thought that his end was drawing near. If the devil then
had power over his soul, his imps might drag him wherever they pleased,
if only he might see little Juli there and hear her call "Baba" and
"Father." It would lessen the tortures of hell, however severe they
might be. Was it possible for him to conceive of any greater folly than
to rob himself of this consolation by transporting the child, through
the indulgence, to the kingdom of heaven, where he could never see her
again. He had accumulated a goodly sum by begging, it is true, but,
strangely enough, he did not think of purchasing salvation for himself
in order to meet his child again in heaven, instead of amid the flames
of purgatory. Though he had become as rich as the Fuggers, paradise, he
knew, would still be closed to him. He was not fit for it.

He hated everybody who was rich and respectable. He would rather be
with his child in the mire of hell than to go with her to a magnificent
garden of paradise where swearing was forbidden, where there was no
brandy and no highroad, and which offered only pleasures which were none
to him.

So Kuni was forced to see the child remain in the fires of purgatory,
which hurt her little less than her aching limb.

At her entrance into The Blue Pike pain and mental suffering had driven
her to the verge of despair. But the day which began so sorrowfully was
followed by an evening of delight--she owed to it her new meeting with
Lienhard.

From childhood she had been homeless, and every quarter of the globe to
which a highroad led was her native land. Yet in Spain and during the
journey back she had felt a gnawing longing for Germany, nay, nothing
had troubled her more than the thought of dying and being buried outside
of its frontier. Her mother, a native of the Rhine country, had given
her birth during the fair at Cologne on the Spree; but, whenever
homesickness assailed her, it was always the steeples of St. Sebald
and