a new
year's greeting. Are you going to do the same, most noble sir, or
don't you think a Burgomaster of the free city of Freiberg--which, with
refugees, now counts over sixty thousand souls--is at least as good a
man as the commander of two hundred and ninety soldiers?'

Schoenleben clasped his hands behind his back, and paced slowly and
thoughtfully up and down his room.

If any reader mentally charges the author with exaggeration here, he
does him an injustice. The writer has had many opportunities of
knowing officials, both of high and low degree, who were, quite
unconsciously to themselves, tools in the hands of their servants, the
latter being permitted a freedom of speech that would never have been
tolerated in equals. Such servants have always had the knack of making
themselves indispensable, while preserving an outward appearance of the
deepest humility; and thus it has often come to pass that a lord has
been made to discharge a shaft aimed by his humble vassal.

When Juechziger's crafty eye saw that the arrow he had thus been
pointing was, so to speak, ready to be loosed from the bow, he adroitly
changed the subject of conversation to something that lay much nearer
his heart.

'You are aware, respected Herr Burgomaster,' he began again in a
wheedling tone, 'that when I entered on my office I married the widow
of Schmidt, my predecessor. I did it partly out of compassion for the
poor woman, and partly to save the town the expense of keeping her and
her son, who is now a boy of fourteen years old. My wife, a woman five
years older than myself, all at once went stone blind, so that now I am
forced to have a servant to wait on her. I had the good fortune to
apprentice the boy to Mistress Bluethgen, the carpenter's widow, but his
mother has petted and pampered him until he is a good-for-nothing, lazy
young rascal. And now that the workshops are closed and the craftsmen
and journeymen all take their turn at military duty, the boy's mistress
threatens to send him home and put me to the expense of keeping
him,--me that scarcely knows which way to turn for bread to feed my
wife and her servant! The worst of it is that all my wife's little
property, a small house outside the Peter Gate, has been levelled with
the ground by order of Burgomaster Richzenhayn, and I have never had a
single kreuzer[1] for my loss. The house was worth three hundred and
fifty gulden.[2] Gracious Herr Burgomaster, take me and my s