Madelaine returned to school, and had the happiness of taking her brother with her there.  Some years after, Raphael devoted his recovered sight to painting, for which he showed great talent.  When he had arrived at a great degree of perfection in this beautiful art, he painted a picture of Christ Restoring the Blind to Sight.  Large sums were offered him for this chef-d’oeuvre, but he rejected them all, and sent the picture to Dr. Wundel, who showed his beautiful present to the Prince Royal.  Raphael’s gratitude pleased the Prince even more than the picture; he immediately named him his painter, and allowed him a considerable salary, which Raphael had the inexpressible happiness of sharing with his beloved mothers and no less beloved and fondly cherished Madelaine.

          THE
    BOY AND THE BOOK
          or
   HANS GENSFLEISCH,
  The Little Printer

[Illustration:  frontispiece]

PART I.

THE BOY.

Can English boys and girls living now in the nineteenth century, carry their minds back so far in time as to the period when our Henry the Fourth was reigning in England, and can they travel in thought so far distant as to the country called Germany, and picture to themselves the life of a little boy at that time and in that country?  If so, we will tell them something of the life of Hans Gensfleisch, the only son of a poor widow, who lived about the beginning of the fifteenth century, not far from Mainz, or Mayence, a city built on the banks of the river Rhine, about half-way between its source and the sea.  The father of Hans had been a dyer, and had at one time carried on rather a thriving business in Mainz; but after his death Frau[1] Gensfleisch had gone with her son to live at a little village called Steinheim, about three miles from the city walls, where, on a few acres of land, bought with her husband’s savings, and laid out partly as garden, and partly as field and vineyard, she contrived to live with this, her only child.  Hans and his mother cultivated the little garden, sowed their own crops of barley and flax in their little fields, and tended and trained the vines in their small vineyard.  Strong and active, and fond of employment, the life of the little Hans was one long course of busy industry, from the sowing of seeds in Spring to the gathering in of their small vintage late in the Autumn.  And in the long winter nights, there was always too much to do within the cottage walls, by the light of their pine wood fire, for him ever to find the time hang heavy on his hands.  One night he would be busy helping his mother to comb and hackle her little store of flax; on another he would mend the net, with which he at times contrived to catch his mother a river fish or two for supper; and it would be play to him when nothing else was wanting his help, to go on with the making of a cross-bow and arrows with which he intended some day to bring down many a wild duck or wood-pigeon.