“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.

Now it was all over with studying.

And yet—­it could not be so very serious a matter, for Doctor Eberbach had just read something aloud at which the young Nuremberg ambassador, Lienhard Groland, could not help laughing heartily.  It seemed to amuse the others wonderfully, too, and even caused the astute Dr. Peutinger to strike his clinched fist upon the table with the exclamation, “A devil of a fellow!” and Wilibald Pirckheimer to assent eagerly, praising Hutten’s ardent love for his native land and courage in battling for its elevation; but this Hutten whom he so lauded was the ill-advised scion of the knightly race that occupied Castle Steckelberg in his Hessian home, whom he knew well.  The state of his purse was evident from the fact that the landlord of The Pike had once been obliged to detain him because he could not pay the bill—­though it was by no means large—­in any other coin than merry tales.