A delightful life now began in the smithy for Adam. The gossips avoided
his wife, but they stared at her in church, and among them she seemed to
him, not unjustly, like a rose amid vegetables. The marriage he had made
was an abomination to respectable citizens, but Adam did not heed them,
and Flora appeared to feel equally happy with him. When, before the
close of the first twelvemonth after their wedding, Ulrich was born, the
smith reached the summit of happiness and remained there for a whole
year.

When, during that time, he stood in the bow-window amid the fresh balsam,
auricular and yellow wallflowers holding his boy on his shoulder, while
his wife leaned on his arm, and the pungent odor of scorched hoofs
reached his nostrils, and he saw his journeyman and apprentice shoeing a
horse below, he often thought how pleasant it had been pursuing the finer
branches of his craft in Nuremberg, and that he should like to forge a
flower again; but the blacksmith's trade was not to be despised either,
and surely life with one's wife and child was best.

In the evening he drank his beer at the Lamb, and once, when the surgeon
Siedler called life a miserable vale of tears, he laughed in his face and
answered: "To him who knows how to take it right, it is a delightful
garden."

Florette was kind to her husband, and devoted herself to her child, so
long as he was an infant, with the most self-sacrificing love. Adam
often spoke of a little daughter, who must look exactly like its mother;
but it did not come.

When little Ulrich at last began to run about in the street,
the mother's nomadic blood stirred, and she was constantly dinning it