retained her neat appearance, expressed shrewdness and energy.

Wolf's services were a pleasure and an honour. A grateful, affectionate
glance acknowledged each, and meanwhile he became clearly aware of the
treasure which he, the orphaned youth, possessed in this faithful old
friend.

If he saw aright, she might yet live a long time, and this gave him
heartfelt joy. With her he would lose the last witness of his childhood,
the chronicle, as it were, of his earliest youth. He could not
understand why he had never before induced her to tell him her
recollections.

During his boyhood, which was crowded with work, he had been content when
she told him in general outlines that, during the Peasant War, fierce
bands had attacked his father's castle, that one of his own bondmen had
slain him with an axe, and that his mother had fled with Wolf to
Ratisbon, where her brother lived as provost of the cathedral. He had
invited her, at the outbreak of the peasant insurrection, to place
herself under his protection.

The old woman had also described to him how, amid great hardships, they
had reached the city in midwinter, and finally that his mother found
Baron Sandhof, her brother, at the point of death, and, after her hope of
having a home with the provost of the cathedral was baffled, she had
taken the veil in the convent of the Dominicans, called here the Black
Penitents. Wolf's foster father, the organist Stenzel, who was closely
connected with his uncle, had rendered this step easier for the deserted
widow by receiving the little boy in his childless home.