or their malicious tricks, was fulfilled to the letter in the case of more than one of them.  The gamins always have instinct enough to know whom their sting will strike first and sharpest, and therefore I was, for a time, the one most exposed to their spite.  Sometimes a boy pretended to be reading very zealously in the catechism, which he held close before his face, but instead he whispered over the top of the page all sorts of scurrilous things in my ear, and asked me if I were still stupid enough to believe that children came out of the well, and that the stork fetched them up?  Sometimes another called to me “If you want an apple, take it out of my pocket, I brought one along for you!” And when I did so, he cried!  “Susanna, I am being robbed,” and denied having said anything to me.  A third even spat upon his book and then began to howl and declared with a brazen face that I had done it.

Although I was almost the only one exposed to vexations of this kind, partly because I felt them most keenly, and partly because they succeeded best with me on account of my extreme unwariness, there were other annoyances which all, without exception, had to put up with.  Foremost among these was the bragging of certain overgrown young rogues who were considerably ahead of us others in years, but in spite of that still sat on the A.B.C. bench, and from time to time played truant.  They got nothing out of it at the time but double and threefold boredom, for as they dared not go home and could not find any playmates, there was nothing for them to do but crouch down behind a hedge or lurk in a dried-up ditch until the hour of deliverance struck, and then to mingle with us on the way home as though they really had been where they belonged.  But they knew how to make up for it and get some fun for themselves afterward, when they came back to school and related their adventures.  They would tell us how once their father had gone by right close to the hedge, the cane with which he used to thrash them in his hand, and yet had not noticed them; how another time their mother, accompanied by the spitz dog, had come up to the ditch, the dog had smelt them out, their mother had discovered them, but the lie that they had been sent there by Susanna herself to pick camomile flowers for her, had helped them through in spite of all.  Then they plumed themselves like old soldiers who are telling their heroic deeds to wondering recruits, and the moral always was:  we risk the whip and the cane, you at most the switch, and yet you do not dare to do anything.

This was irritating and all the more so as it was not possible absolutely to deny the truth of their assertions.  Hence when the son of a cobbler once came to school with his back black and blue, and told us his father had caught him and punished him severely with his shoemaker’s stirrup, but that he was only going to try it now all the oftener, for he was no coward, I also determined to show my courage, and that, too, that very afternoon.