could not silence it, caused her pain. But her conversation soon
revealed that she knew every stick and stone in her native city. Kuni
availed herself of this, and did not need to ask many questions to learn
everything that she desired to know about the little begarlanded elf.

She was Juliane, the young daughter of Herr Conrad Peutinger, the city
clerk--a girl of unusual cleverness, and a degree of learning never
before found in a child eleven years old. The bath-house keeper had many
wonderful stories to relate of her remarkable wisdom, with which even
highly educated men could not vie. In doing so, she blamed the father
and mother, who had been unnatural parents to the charming child; for to
make the marvel complete, and to gratify their own vanity, they had taxed
the little girl's mind with such foolish strenuousness that the frail
body suffered. She had heard this in her own bath-house from the lips of
the child's aunt and from other distinguished friends of the Welsers and
Peutingers. Unfortunately, these sensible women proved to have been
right; for soon after the close of the Reichstag, Juliane was attacked by
a lingering illness, from which rumour now asserted that she would never
recover. Some people even regarded the little girl's sickness as a just
punishment of God, to whom the constant devotion of the father and his
young daughter to the old pagans and their ungodly writings must have
given grave offence.

This news increased to the utmost the anxiety from which Kuni had long
suffered. Often as she thought of Lienhard, she remembered still more
frequently that it was she, who had prayed for sickness to visit the
child of a mother, who had so kindly offered her, the strolling player,
whom good women usually shunned, the shelter of her distinguished house.

The consciousness of owing a debt of gratitude to those, against whom she