In a very humble manner she protested that Kuni was an extraordinarily charitable creature.  In a cart standing in the meadow by the highroad lay the widow of a beggar, Nickel; whom the peasants had hung on account of many a swindling trick.  A goose and some chickens had strayed off to his premises.  The woman had just given birth to twins when Nickel was hung, and she was now in a violent fever, with frequent attacks of convulsions, and yet had to nurse the infants.  The landlady of The Pike had sent her some broth and a little milk for the children.  As for Kuni, she had gone to carry some linen from her own scanty store to the two babies, who were as naked as little frogs.  He would find her with the sick mother.

All this flowed from Gitta’s lips with so much confidence that Dietel, whose heart was easily touched by such a deed of charity, though he by no means put full confidence in her, allowed himself to be induced to let the city soldiers alone for the present and test the truth of her strange statement himself.

So he prepared to go in search of the cart, but the landlord of The Pike met him at the door, and, angrily asking what ailed him that day, ordered him to fetch the Erbach, more of which was wanted inside.  Dietel went down into the cellar again, but this time he was not to leave it so speedily, for the apprentice of a Nuremberg master shoemaker, whose employer was going to the Frankfort fair with his goods, and who made common cause with the feather dealer, stole after Dietel, and of his own volition, for his own pleasure, locked him in.  The good Kitzing wine had strengthened his courage.  Besides, experience taught him that an offence would be more easily pardoned the more his master himself disliked the person against whom it was committed.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

Arrogant wave of the hand, and in an instructive tone
Honest anger affords a certain degree of enjoyment
Ovid, ‘We praise the ancients’
Pays better to provide for people’s bodies than for their brains
Who gives great gifts, expects great gifts again
Who watches for his neighbour’s faults has a hundred sharp eyes

IN THE BLUE PIKE

By Georg Ebers

Volume 2.

CHAPTER IV.

The ropedancer, Kuni, really had been with the sick mother and her babes, and had toiled for them with the utmost diligence.

The unfortunate woman was in great distress.

The man who had promised to take her in his cart to her native village of Schweinfurt barely supported himself and his family by the tricks of his trained poodles.  He made them perform their very best feats in the taverns, under the village lindens, and at the fairs.  But the children who gazed at the four-footed artists, though they never failed to give hearty applause, frequently paid in no other coin.  He would gladly have helped the unfortunate woman, but to maintain the wretched mother and her twins imposed too heavy a burden upon the kind-hearted vagabond, and he had withdrawn his aid.