they became affiliated, so prominent in all the councils of the good
free city, and so noted for excellence in art and learning. Indeed
the present head of the family, Master Gottfried Sorel, was so much
esteemed for his learning that he had once had serious thoughts of
terming himself Magister Gothofredus Oxalicus, and might have carried
it out but for the very decided objections of his wife, Dame Johanna,
and his little niece, Christina, to being dubbed by any such surname.

Master Gottfried had had a scapegrace younger brother named Hugh, who
had scorned both books and tools, had been the plague of the
workshop, and, instead of coming back from his wandering year of
improvement, had joined a band of roving Lanzknechts. No more had
been heard of him for a dozen or fifteen years, when he suddenly
arrived at the paternal mansion at Ulm, half dead with intermittent
fever, and with a young, broken-hearted, and nearly expiring wife,
his spoil in his Italian campaigns. His rude affection had utterly
failed to console her for her desolated home and slaughtered kindred,
and it had so soon turned to brutality that, when brought to
comparative peace and rest in his brother's home, there was nothing
left for the poor Italian but to lie down and die, commending her
babe in broken German to Hausfrau Johanna, and blessing Master
Gottfried for his flowing Latin assurances that the child should be
to them even as the little maiden who was lying in the God's acre
upon the hillside

And verily the little Christina had been a precious gift to the
bereaved couple. Her father had no sooner recovered than he returned
to his roving life, and, except for a report that he had been seen
among the retainers of one of the robber barons of the Swabian Alps,
nothing had been heard of him; and Master Gottfried only hoped to be