“For her children’s sake she crushed the pride which rebelled against it, and stood at the church door, not once, but again and again.  The other mendicants, however, treated her so roughly, and the cruel enmity with which they tried to crowd her out of her place seemed so unbearable, that she could not hold out.  Once, when they insulted her too much, and again thrust her back so spitefully that not even one of the many churchgoers noticed her, she, fled to her children in the little room, determined to stop this horrible begging.  This happened the Saturday before Whitsuntide, and as she had gone out hoping this time to bring something back, she had promised the children food enough to satisfy their hunger.  They should have some Whitsuntide cakes, too, as they did years ago.  When she reached the house and little Walpurga—­you’ll see her presently, a pretty child six years old—­ran to meet her, asking for the cakes and the bread to satisfy her hunger, while Annelein, who is somewhat older, but less bright and active, did the same, she felt as if she should die, and carrying the baby, which she had held in her arms while begging at the church door, back into the room, she told Walpurga to watch it, as she had long been in the habit of doing, until she came back with the bread.

“For the children’s sake she would try begging once more, but she could not go to St. Sebald’s.

“So she went from house to house, asking alms; but she was a well-formed woman, who did not show her serious illness.  She kept herself tidy, too, and looked better in her poor rags than many who were better off.  Had she carried her nursing infant, perhaps she might have succeeded better, but even the most compassionate housewives either turned her from their doors or offered her work at the wash-tub, or in cleaning or gardening.  The weakness from which she had suffered since the birth of her child made stooping so painful that she could not do what they required.

“When she was at last obliged to turn homeward, because the baby had probably been screaming for her a long time, she had only one small copper coin, with which she went to the baker Kilian’s, in the Stopfelgasse, to ask for a penny’s worth of bread.  The baker’s wife was not there, and her spinster sister-in-law, an elderly, ill-natured woman, was serving the customers in her place.

“As she turned to cut the bit of bread, and all sorts of nice sweet cakes lay on the shining counters before poor Riecklein, the children seemed to stand before her, headed by Walpurga, asking for the cakes and the bread she had promised them to eat their fill; and as no one was passing in the quiet street, Satan stirred within her for the first time, and a sweet jumble slid into the little basket on her arm.  Had she stopped there she might have escaped unpunished; but there were two hungry little beaks agape in the nest, and she saw a pretty lamb with a little red flag on its back.  If Walpurga could only have it!  And with the clumsiness due to her inexperience in such matters she seized that, too, and put it with the other.