orldly singers.

But their perfection of execution was attained at a cost almost too
great. Brother Friedsam was a fanatic, and he was also an artist. He
obliged the brethren and sisters to submit to the most rigorous
training. In this, as in religion, he subordinated them to his ideals.
He would fain tune their very souls to his own key; and he exacted a
precision that was difficult of attainment by men and women of average
fallibility and carelessness. The men singers were divided into five
choruses of five persons each; the sisters were classified, according
to the pitch of their voices, into three divisions, each of which sang
or kept silent, according to the duty assigned to it in the notebook.
At the love-feasts these choruses sat side by side at the table, so as
to be ready to sing together with perfect precision whenever a song
should be announced. At the singing school Brother Friedsam could not
abide the least defect; he rated roundly the brother or sister who made
any mistake; he scourged their lagging aspirations toward perfection.
If it is ever necessary to account for bad temper in musicians, one
might suggest that the water-gruel diet had impaired his temper and
theirs; certain it is that out of the production of so much heavenly
harmony there sprang discord. The brethren and sisters grew daily more
and more indignant at the severity of the director, whom they
reverenced as a religious guide, but against whom, as a musical
conductor, they rebelled in their hearts.

The sisters were the first to act in this crisis. At their knitting and
their sewing they talked about it, in the kitchen they discussed it,
until their hearts burned within them. Even in illuminating the
notebook with pretty billing turtledoves, and emblematic flowers such
as must have grown in paradise, since nothing of the sort was ever
known in any earthly garden--even in painting these, some of the nuns
came near to spoiling their colors and blurring their pages with tears.

Only Margaretha Thome, who was known in the convent as Sister Tabea,
shed no tears. She worked with pen and brush, and heard the others
talk; now and then, when some severe word of Brother Friedsam's was
repeated, she would look up with a significant flash of the eye.

"The Hofcavalier doesn't talk," said Sister Thecla. This Thecla had
given the nickname of "Hofcavalier" (_noble courtier_), to Tabea at her
first arrival in the convent on account of her magnificent f