e a valuable aid, and imagination was able to fill the gaps; and
though it failed, no doubt, to reproduce Margery Schopper's memoirs
phrase for phrase and word for word, I have on the whole succeeded
in transcribing with considerable exactitude all that she herself had
thought worthy to be rescued from oblivion. Moreover I have avoided the
repetition of the mode of talk in the fifteenth century, when German
was barely commencing to be used as a written language, since scholars,
writers, and men of letters always chose the Latin tongue for any great
or elegant intellectual work. The narrator's expressions would only
be intelligible to a select few, and, I should have done my Margery
injustice, had I left the ideas and descriptions, whose meaning I
thoroughly understood, in the clumsy form she had given them. The
language of her day is a mirror whose uneven surface might easily
reflect the fairest picture in blurred or distorted out lines to modern
eyes. Much, indeed which most attracted me in her descriptions will
have lost its peculiar charm in mine; as to whether I have always
supplemented her correctly, that must remain an open question.

I have endeavored to throw myself into the mind and spirit of my Margery
and repeat her tale with occasional amplification, in a familiar style,
yet with such a choice of words as seems suitable to the date of her
narrative. Thus I have perpetuated all that she strove to record for her
descendants out of her warm heart and eager brain; though often in mere
outline and broken sentences, still, in the language of her time and of
her native province.

MARGERY

BOOK 1.

CHAPTER I.

I, MARGERY SCHOPPER, was born in the year of our Lord 1404, on the
Tuesday after Palm Sunday. My uncle Christan Pfinzing of the Burg, a
widower whose wife had been a Schopper, held me at the font. My father,
God have his soul, was Franz Schopper, known as Franz the Singer. He
died in the night of the Monday after Laetare Sunday in 1404, and his
wife my mother, God rest her, whose name was Christine, was born a
Behaim; she had brought him my two brothers Herdegen and Kunz, and she
died on the eve of Saint Catharine's day 1404; so that I lost my mother
while I was but a babe, and God dealt hardly with me also in taking my
father to Himself in His mercy, before I ever saw the light.

Instead of a loving father, such as other children have, I had only a
grave in the churchyard, and the goo