ndly, but he had been a morose,
deeply embittered man. How pitilessly he had flogged him and the other
boys with hazel rods. And he would have been still harsher and sterner
but for his mother's intercession.

A pleasant smile hovered around his lips as he remembered her. Instead
of continuing to listen to the Greek sentences which Herr Wilibald
Pirckheimer was reading aloud to the others, he could not help thinking
of the pious, gentle little woman who, with her cheerful kindness, so
well understood how to comfort and to sustain courage. She never railed
or scolded; at the utmost she only wiped her eyes with her apron when
the farmers of his little native town in Hesse sent to the schoolmaster,
for the school tax, grain too bad for bread, hay too sour for the three
goats, and half-starved fowls.

He thoughtfully patted the plump abdomen which, thanks to the fleshpots
of The Blue Pike, had grown so rotund in his fifteen years of service.

"It pays better to provide for people's bodies than for their brains,"
he said to himself. "The Nuremberg and Augsburg gentlemen outside are
rich folk's children. For them learning is only the raisins, almonds,
and citron in the cake; knowledge agrees with them better than it did
with my father. He was the ninth child of respectable stocking weavers,
but, as the pastor perceived that he was gifted with special ability,
his parents took a portion of their savings to make him a scholar. The
tuition fee and the boy were both confided to a Beanus--that is, an
older pupil, who asserted that he understood Latin--in order that he
might look after the inexperienced little fellow and help him out of
school as well as in. But, instead of using for his protigee the florins
intrusted to him, the Beanus shamefully squandered the money saved for a
beloved child by so many sacrifices. While he feasted on roast meat and
wine, the little boy placed in his charge went hungry." Whenever, in
after years, the old man described this time of suffering, his son
listened with clinched fists, and when Dietel saw a Beanus at The Blue
Pike snatch the best pieces from the child in his care, he interfered
in his behalf sternly enough. Nay, he probably brought to him from the
kitchen, on his own account, a piece of roast meat or a sausage. Many
of the names which fell from the moist lips of the gentlemen
outside--Lucian and Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, Homer and Plato--were
perfectly familiar to him. The words the lit