CHAPTER IV.

The ropedancer, Kuni, really had been with the sick mother and her babes,
and had toiled for them with the utmost diligence.

The unfortunate woman was in great distress.

The man who had promised to take her in his cart to her native village of
Schweinfurt barely supported himself and his family by the tricks of his
trained poodles. He made them perform their very best feats in the
taverns, under the village lindens, and at the fairs. But the children
who gazed at the four-footed artists, though they never failed to give
hearty applause, frequently paid in no other coin. He would gladly have
helped the unfortunate woman, but to maintain the wretched mother and her
twins imposed too heavy a burden upon the kind-hearted vagabond, and he
had withdrawn his aid.

Then the ropedancer met her. True, she herself was in danger of being
left lying by the wayside; but she was alone, and the mother had her
children. These were two budding hopes, while she had nothing more to
expect save the end--the sooner the better. There could be no new
happiness for her.

And yet, to have found some one who was even more needy than she, lifted
her out of herself, and to have power to be and do something in her
behalf pleased her, nay, even roused an emotion akin to that which, in
better days, she had felt over a piece of good fortune which others
envied. Perhaps she herself might be destined to die on the highway,