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.

“It pays better to provide for people’s bodies than for their brains,” he said to himself.  “The Nuremberg and Augsburg gentlemen outside are rich folk’s children.  For them learning is only the raisins, almonds, and citron in the cake; knowledge agrees with them better than it did with my father.  He was the ninth child of respectable stocking weavers, but, as the pastor perceived that he was gifted with special ability, his parents took a portion of their savings to make him a scholar.  The tuition fee and the boy were both confided to a Beanus—­that is, an older pupil, who asserted that he understood Latin—­in order that he might look after the inexperienced little fellow and help him out of school as well as in.  But, instead of using for his protigee the florins intrusted to him, the Beanus shamefully squandered the money saved for a beloved child by so many sacrifices.  While he feasted on roast meat and wine, the little boy placed in his charge went hungry.”  Whenever, in after years, the old man described this time of suffering, his son listened with clinched fists, and when Dietel saw a Beanus at The Blue Pike snatch the best pieces from the child in his care, he interfered in his behalf sternly enough.  Nay, he probably brought to him from the kitchen, on his own account, a piece of roast meat or a sausage.  Many of the names which fell from the moist lips of the gentlemen outside—­Lucian and Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, Homer and Plato—­were perfectly familiar to him.  The words the little doctor was reading must belong to their writings.  How attentively the others listened!  Had not Dietel run away from the monks’ school at Fulda he, too, might have enjoyed the witticisms of these sages, or even been permitted to sit at the same table with the great lights of the Church from Cologne.