s, had bound
her to the blasphemer.

The travelling scholars set off singing merrily; but the strolling
musicians waited for the ship to sail down the Main, on whose voyage
they could earn money and have plenty to drink.

The vagrants tramped along the highway, one after another, without
troubling themselves about the dying ropedancer.

"Everybody finds it hard enough to bear his own cross," said Jungel,
seizing his long crutches. Only "Dancing Gundel" lingered in Miltenberg
through sympathy in the fate of the companion who had reached the height
of fame, while she, the former "Phyllis," had gone swiftly downhill. It
was a Christian duty, she said to the blind boy who begged their bread,
not to let Kuni, who had once held so lofty a position, take the last
journey without a suitable escort. When she heard that her former
companion had received the sacrament, she exclaimed to her blind son,
while slicing garlic into the barley porridge: "She will now be at rest.
We shall earn a pretty penny at the mass in Frankfort if you can only
manage to look as sorrowful when you hold out your hand as you do now!"

The monks, the dealer in indulgences, the burghers and artisans who
were just preparing to embark for the voyage down the Main, gazed
in bewilderment at the distinguished gentlemen who, incredible as it
seemed, had actually--for Dietel said so--foregone their morning nap
for the sake of a vagabond girl. The feather-curler shook his head as
if something marvellous had happened when he heard the ambassador of
the Honourable Council of his own native city, the distinguished Herr
Lienhard Groland, say to old Doctor Schedel:

"I will wait here with you, my venerable friend. Since the poor girl can
live only a few hours longer, I can join the others, if I hurry, before
they leave Frankfort."

"That's right, Lienhard," cried Wilibald Pirckheimer, and the Abbot of
St. AEgidius added approvingly:

"You will thereby do something which is pleasing in the sight of Heaven.
Yes, gentlemen, I repeat it: there are few deathbeds beside which I have
found so little reason to be ashamed of the fate of being a mortal as
by the humble couch of this vagabond girl. If, before the judgment seat
above, intention and faith are weighed with the same scales as works,
few who close their eyes behind silken curtains will be so sure of a
favourable sentence as this poorest of the poor."

"Did the girl really keep no portion of Herr Lienhard's r