executioner's house, from which the whole street was probably named.
One wretched hovel succeeded another. Yonder before a door, Wilhelm the
idiot, on whom the city boys played their pranks, smiled into vacancy
just as foolishly as he had done twenty years ago, here lodged Kathrin,
with the big goitre, who swept the gutters; in the three grey huts, from
which hung numerous articles of ragged clothing, lived two families of
charcoal-burners, and Caspar, the juggler, a strange man, whom as a boy
he had seen in the pillory, with his deformed daughters, who in winter
washed laces and in summer went with him to the fairs.

In the hovels, before which numerous children were playing, lived honest,
but poor foresters. It was the home of want and misery. Only the
jockey's house and one other would have been allowed to exist in the
city. The latter was occupied by the Jew, Costa, who ten years before
had come from a distant country to the city with his aged father and a
dumb wife, and remained there, for a little daughter was born and the old
man was afterwards seized with a fatal illness. But the inhabitants
would tolerate no Jews among them, so the stranger moved into the
forester's house on the Richtberg which had stood empty because a better
one had been built deeper in the woods. The city treasury could use the
rent and tax exacted from Jews and demanded of the stranger. The Jew
consented to the magistrate's requirement, but as it soon became known
that he pored over huge volumes all day long and pursued no business, yet
paid for everything in good money, he was believed to be an alchemist and
sorcerer.

All who lived here were miserable or despised, and when Adam had left the
Richtberg he told himself that he no longer belonged among the proud and
unblemished and since he felt dishonored and took disgrace in the same
dogged earnest, that he did everything else, he believed the people in