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.

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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but to maintain the wretched mother and her twins imposed too heavy a burden upon the kind-hearted vagabond, and he had withdrawn his aid.

Then the ropedancer met her.  True, she herself was in danger of being left lying by the wayside; but she was alone, and the mother had her children.  These were two budding hopes, while she had nothing more to expect save the end—­the sooner the better.  There could be no new happiness for her.

And yet, to have found some one who was even more needy than she, lifted her out of herself, and to have power to be and do something in her behalf pleased her, nay, even roused an emotion akin to that which, in better days, she had felt over a piece of good fortune which others envied.  Perhaps she herself might be destined to die on the highway, without consolation, the very next day; but she could save this unhappy woman from it, and render her end easier.  Oh, how rich Lienhard’s gold coins made her!