as we should ever
find something worthy of honor even in the most froward and least
pleasing to ourselves. And these words I have ever kept in mind, and
many times have they given me pause, when the hot blood of the Schoppers
has bid me stoop and pick up a stone to fling at my neighbor.

No longer than three days after she had thus bidden us to her side,
Sister Margaret entered into her rest; she had been our strait but
gentle teacher, and her learning was as far above that of most women of
her time as the heavens are high; and as her mortal body lay, no longer
bent, but at full length in the coffin, the saintly lady, who before she
took the vows had been a Countess of Lupfen, belonged, meseemed, to a
race taller than ours by a head. A calm, queenlike dignity was on her
noble thin face; and, this corpse being the first, as it fell, that I
had ever looked on, it so worked on my mind that death, of which I had
heretofore been in terror, took the image in my young soul of a great
Master to whom we must indeed bow, but who is not our foe.

I never could earn such praise as Ann, who was by good right at our
head; notwithstanding I ever stood high. And the vouchers I carried
home were enough to content Cousin Maud, for her great wish that her
foster-children should out-do others was amply fulfilled by Herdegen,
the eldest. He was indeed filled with sleeping learning, as it were,
and I often conceived that he needed only fitting instruction and a fair
start to wake it up. For even he did not attain his learning without
pains, and they who deem that it flew into his mouth agape are sorely
mistaken. Many a time have I sat by his side while he pored over his
books, and I could see how he set to work in right earnest when once he
had cast away sports and pastime. Thus with three mighty blows he would
smite the nail home, which a weaker hand could not do with twenty.
For whole weeks he might be idle and about divers matters which had no
concern with schooling; and then, of a sudden, set to work; and it would
so wholly possess his soul that he would not have seen a stone drop
close at his feet.

My second brother, Kunz, was not at all on this wise. Not that he was
soft-witted; far from it. His head was as clear as ever another's for
all matters of daily life; but he found it hard to learn scholarship,
and what Herdegen could master in one hour, it took him a whole livelong
day to get. Notwithstanding he was not one of the dunces,