brethren and their fellows, than I in the peaceful home by the river,
where none but seemly speech was ever heard and sweet singing, nor ever
seen but labor and good order and content.

Right glad was I to tarry there; but yet how good it was when Ann got
leave to come to us for the whole of Sunday from noon till eventide; when
we would first sit and chatter and play alone together, and talk over all
we had done in school; thereafter we had my brothers with us, and would
go out to take the air under the care of my cousin or of Magister Peter,
or abide at home to sing or have merry pastime.

After the Ave Maria, the old organist, Adam Heyden, Ann's grand uncle,
would come to seek her, and many sweet memories dwell in my mind of that
worthy and gifted man, which I might set down were it not that I am Ann's
debtor for so many things that made my childhood happy. It was she, for
a certainty, who first taught me truly to play; for whereas my dolls, and
men-at-arms and shop games, albeit they were small, were in all points
like the true great ones, she had but a staff of wood wrapped round with
a kerchief which she rocked in her arms for a babe; and when she played a
shop game with the little ones, she marked stones and leaves to be their
wares and their money, and so found far greater pastime than we when we
played with figs and almonds and cloves out of little wooden chests and
linen-cloth sacks, and weighed them with brass weights on little scales
with a tongue and string. It was she who brought imagination to bear on
my pastimes, and many a time has she borne my fancy far enough from the
Pegnitz, over seas and rivers to groves of palm and golden fairy lands.

Our fellowship with my brethren was grateful to her as it was to me; but
meseems it was a different thing in those early years from what it was in
later days. While I write a certain summer day from that long past time