Dietel, the schoolmaster's son, who had once sat on the bench with the
pupils of the Latin class, pricked up his cars; he heard foreign words
which interested him like echoes of memories of his childhood. He did
not understand them, yet he liked to listen, for they made him think of
his dead father. He had always meant kindly, but he had been a morose,
deeply embittered man. How pitilessly he had flogged him and the other
boys with hazel rods. And he would have been still harsher and sterner
but for his mother's intercession.

A pleasant smile hovered around his lips as he remembered her. Instead
of continuing to listen to the Greek sentences which Herr Wilibald
Pirckheimer was reading aloud to the others, he could not help thinking
of the pious, gentle little woman who, with her cheerful kindness, so
well understood how to comfort and to sustain courage. She never railed
or scolded; at the utmost she only wiped her eyes with her apron when the
farmers of his little native town in Hesse sent to the schoolmaster, for
the school tax, grain too bad for bread, hay too sour for the three
goats, and half-starved fowls.

He thoughtfully patted the plump abdomen which, thanks to the fleshpots
of The Blue Pike, had grown so rotund in his fifteen years of service.

"It pays better to provide for people's bodies than for their brains," he
said to himself. "The Nuremberg and Augsburg gentlemen outside are rich
folk's children. For them learning is only the raisins, almonds, and
citron in the cake; knowledge agrees with them better than it did with my
father. He was the ninth child of respectable stocking weavers, but, as
the pastor perceived that he was gifted with special ability, his parents
took a portion of their savings to make him a scholar. The tuition fee
and the boy were both confided to a Beanus--that is, an older pupil, who