Platter’s account of his life at Breslau is worth quoting.  ’I was ill three times in one winter, so that they were obliged to bring me into the hospital; for the travelling scholars had a particular hospital and physicians for themselves.  Care was taken of the patients, and they had good beds, only the vermin were so abundant that, like many others, I lay much rather upon the floor than in the beds.  Through the winter the fags lay upon the floor in the school, but the Bacchants in small chambers, of which at St. Elizabeth’s there were several hundreds.  But in summer, when it was hot, we lay in the church-yard, collected together grass such as is spread in summer on Saturdays in the gentlemen’s streets before the doors, and lay in it like pigs in the straw.  When it rained, we ran into the school, and when there was thunder, we sang the whole night with the Subcantor, responses and other sacred music.  Now and then after supper in summer we went into the beerhouses to beg for beer.  The drunken Polish peasants would give us so much that I often could not find my way to the school again, though only a stone’s throw from it.’  Platter wrote his autobiography at the age of 73, when his memories of his youth must have been growing dim; but though on this account we must not press him in details, his main outlines are doubtless correct.

On his return, Butzbach was apprenticed to Aschaffenburg, to learn the trade of tailoring; and having mastered this, he procured for himself, in 1496, the position of a lay-brother in the Benedictine Abbey of Johannisberg in the Rheingau, opposite Bingen.  His duties were manifold.  Besides doing the tailoring of the community, he was expected to make himself generally useful:  to carry water and fetch supplies, to look after guests, to attend the Abbot when he rode abroad (on one occasion he was thrown thus into the company of Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim, whose work on the Ecclesiastical writers of his time he afterwards attempted to carry on), to help in the hay harvest, and in gathering the grapes.  Before a year was out he grew tired of these humble duties, and bethought him anew of his father’s wish that he should become a professed monk.  He had omens too.  One morning his father appeared to him as he was dressing, and smiled upon him.  Another day he was sitting at his work and talking about his wish with an old monk who was sick and under his care.  On the wall in front of his table he had fastened a piece of bread, to be a reminder of the host and of Christ’s sufferings.  Suddenly this fell to the ground.  The old man started up from his place by the stove, and steadying his tottering limbs cried out aloud that this was a sign that the wish was granted.  He had the reputation among his fellows of being a prophet and had foretold the day of his own death.  Butzbach accepted the omen, and obtained leave to go to school again.