breath and added according to his wont: "Prosit, Adam! Thanks, Heyden!"
And emptied the cup which I tilted up for him, to the very bottom. Then,
when he fell back and gazed before him in silence, I found speech, and
noted, albeit it struck me in truth as somewhat strange, that he bore our
good town in mind then, in drinking his old pledge. Hereupon he nodded
kindly and added, with an enquiring glance at the churchwarden: "It is
rightly the duty of every true Christian man to pray for all mankind!
Well, well; but they are so many, so infinitely many; and I, like every
other man, have my own little world, inside the great world, as it were,
and that is my dear old, staunch town of Nuremberg. Never have I been
beyond its precincts, and it contains all on earth that is dear and
precious to me. To me the citizens of Nuremberg are all mankind, and our
city and so much as the eye can see from this tower all my world, small
though it may be. I could ever find some good matter for thought in
Nuremberg, something noble and well-compact, a fine whole. I have never
sought the boundaries of the other, greater world."

Yet, that his world was in truth wider than he weened, was plain to us
from the prayer he murmured wherein we could hear my brothers' names,
albeit land and seas parted them from him. And after that, for a space
all were silent, and he lay gazing at the bone crucifix on the wall; and
at last he besought Dame Giovanna to lift him somewhat higher, and he
drank again a little more, and said right softly as he cast a loving
glance upon us each in turn: "I have looked into my own heart and gazed
on Him on the Cross! That is our ensample! And I depart joyfully--and
if you would know what maketh death so easy to me; it is that I have
needed but little, and kept little for myself; and whereas I was wont to
give away what other men save, I came to know of a certainty that all the
good we do to others is the best we can do for ourselves. It is that, it
is that!"