So Dietel hobbled to the open window, where the strollers were resting.

Cyriax was lying on the floor asleep, with the brandy bottle in his arms.  Two of his companions, with their mouths wide open, were snoring at his side.  Raban, who begged for blood-money, was counting the copper coins which he had received.  Red-haired Gitta was sewing another patch of cloth upon her rough husband’s already well-mended jerkin by the dim light of a small lamp, into which she had put some fat and a bit of rag for a wick.  It was difficult to thread the needle.  Had it not been for the yellow blaze of the pitchpans fastened to the wall with iron clamps, which had already been burning an hour, she could scarcely have succeeded.

“Make room there,” the waiter called to the vagrants, giving the sleeping Jungel a push with his club foot.  The latter grasped his crutch, as he had formerly seized the sword he carried as a foot soldier ere he lost his leg before Padua.  Then, with a Spanish oath learned in the Netherlands, he turned over, still half asleep, on his side.  So Dietel found room, and, after vainly looking for Kuni among the others, gazed out at the starlit sky.

Yonder, in front of the house, beside the tall oleanders which grew in wine casks cut in halves instead of in tubs, the learned and aristocratic gentlemen sat around the table with outstretched heads, examining by the light of the torches the pages which Dr. Eberbach drew forth, one after another, from the inexhaustible folds of the front of his black robe.

Dietel, the schoolmaster’s son, who had once sat on the bench with the pupils of the Latin class, pricked up his cars; he heard foreign words which interested him like echoes of memories of his childhood.  He did not understand them, yet he liked to listen, for they made him think of his dead father.  He had always meant kindly, but he had been a morose, deeply embittered man.  How pitilessly he had flogged him and the other boys with hazel rods.  And he would have been still harsher and sterner but for his mother’s intercession.

A pleasant smile hovered around his lips as he remembered her.  Instead of continuing to listen to the Greek sentences which Herr Wilibald Pirckheimer was reading aloud to the others, he could not help thinking of the pious, gentle little woman who, with her cheerful kindness, so well understood how to comfort and to sustain courage.  She never railed or scolded; at the utmost she only wiped her eyes with her apron when the farmers of his little native town in Hesse sent to the schoolmaster, for the school tax, grain too bad for bread, hay too sour for the three goats, and half-starved fowls.

He thoughtfully patted the plump abdomen which, thanks to the fleshpots of The Blue Pike, had grown so rotund in his fifteen years of service.