No longer than three days after she had thus bidden us to her side,
Sister Margaret entered into her rest; she had been our strait but gentle
teacher, and her learning was as far above that of most women of her time
as the heavens are high; and as her mortal body lay, no longer bent, but
at full length in the coffin, the saintly lady, who before she took the
vows had been a Countess of Lupfen, belonged, meseemed, to a race taller
than ours by a head. A calm, queenlike dignity was on her noble thin
face; and, this corpse being the first, as it fell, that I had ever
looked on, it so worked on my mind that death, of which I had heretofore
been in terror, took the image in my young soul of a great Master to whom
we must indeed bow, but who is not our foe.

I never could earn such praise as Ann, who was by good right at our head;
notwithstanding I ever stood high. And the vouchers I carried home were
enough to content Cousin Maud, for her great wish that her foster-
children should out-do others was amply fulfilled by Herdegen, the
eldest. He was indeed filled with sleeping learning, as it were, and I
often conceived that he needed only fitting instruction and a fair start
to wake it up. For even he did not attain his learning without pains,
and they who deem that it flew into his mouth agape are sorely mistaken.
Many a time have I sat by his side while he pored over his books, and I
could see how he set to work in right earnest when once he had cast away
sports and pastime. Thus with three mighty blows he would smite the nail
home, which a weaker hand could not do with twenty. For whole weeks he
might be idle and about divers matters which had no concern with
schooling; and then, of a sudden, set to work; and it would so wholly
possess his soul that he would not have seen a stone drop close at his
feet.

My second brother, Kunz, was not at all on this wise. Not that he was