When he went out, it seemed to him—­and usually unjustly—­as if people were nudging each other; hands, pointing out-stretched fingers at him, appeared to grow from every eye.  At home he found nothing but desolation, vacuity, sorrow, and a child, who constantly tore open the burning, gnawing wounds in his heart.  Ulrich must forget “the viper,” and he sternly forbade him to speak of his mother; but not a day passed on which he would not fain have done so himself.

The smith did not stay long in the house on the market-place.  He wished to go to Freiburg or Ulm, any place where he had not been with her.  A purchaser for the dwelling, with its lucrative business, was speedily found, the furniture was packed, and the new owner was to move in on Wednesday, when on Monday Bolz, the jockey, came to Adam’s workshop from Richtberg.  The man had been a good customer for years, and bought hundreds of shoes, which he put on the horses at his own forge, for he knew something about the trade.  He came to say farewell; he had his own nest to feather, and could do a more profitable business in the lowlands than up here in the forest.  Finally he offered Adam his property at a very low price.

The smith had smiled at the jockey’s proposal, still he went to the Richtberg the very next day to see the place.  There stood the executioner’s house, from which the whole street was probably named.  One wretched hovel succeeded another.  Yonder before a door, Wilhelm the idiot, on whom the city boys played their pranks, smiled into vacancy just as foolishly as he had done twenty years ago, here lodged Kathrin, with the big goitre, who swept the gutters; in the three grey huts, from which hung numerous articles of ragged clothing, lived two families of charcoal-burners, and Caspar, the juggler, a strange man, whom as a boy he had seen in the pillory, with his deformed daughters, who in winter washed laces and in summer went with him to the fairs.

In the hovels, before which numerous children were playing, lived honest, but poor foresters.  It was the home of want and misery.  Only the jockey’s house and one other would have been allowed to exist in the city.  The latter was occupied by the Jew, Costa, who ten years before had come from a distant country to the city with his aged father and a dumb wife, and remained there, for a little daughter was born and the old man was afterwards seized with a fatal illness.  But the inhabitants would tolerate no Jews among them, so the stranger moved into the forester’s house on the Richtberg which had stood empty because a better one had been built deeper in the woods.  The city treasury could use the rent and tax exacted from Jews and demanded of the stranger.  The Jew consented to the magistrate’s requirement, but as it soon became known that he pored over huge volumes all day long and pursued no business, yet paid for everything in good money, he was believed to be an alchemist and sorcerer.