hey stared at her in church, and among them she seemed to
him, not unjustly, like a rose amid vegetables. The marriage he had made
was an abomination to respectable citizens, but Adam did not heed them,
and Flora appeared to feel equally happy with him. When, before the close
of the first twelvemonth after their wedding, Ulrich was born, the smith
reached the summit of happiness and remained there for a whole year.

When, during that time, he stood in the bow-window amid the fresh balsam,
auricular and yellow wallflowers holding his boy on his shoulder, while
his wife leaned on his arm, and the pungent odor of scorched hoofs
reached his nostrils, and he saw his journeyman and apprentice shoeing a
horse below, he often thought how pleasant it had been pursuing the finer
branches of his craft in Nuremberg, and that he should like to forge a
flower again; but the blacksmith's trade was not to be despised either,
and surely life with one's wife and child was best.

In the evening he drank his beer at the Lamb, and once, when the surgeon
Siedler called life a miserable vale of tears, he laughed in his face and
answered: "To him who knows how to take it right, it is a delightful
garden."

Florette was kind to her husband, and devoted herself to her child, so
long as he was an infant, with the most self-sacrificing love. Adam often
spoke of a little daughter, who must look exactly like its mother; but it
did not come.

When little Ulrich at last began to run about in the street, the mother's
nomadic blood stirred, and she was constantly dinning it into her
husband's ears that he ought to leave this miserable place and go to
Augsburg or Cologne, where it would be pleasant; but he remained firm,
and though her power over him was great, she could not move his resolute
will.

Often she would not cease her entreaties and representations, and when
she even complained that she was dying of solitude and weariness, his
veins swelled with wrath, and then she was frightened, fled to her room
and wept. If she happened to have a bold day, she threatened to go away
and seek her own relatives. This displeased him, and he made her feel it
bitterly, for he was steadfast in everything, even anger, and when he
bore ill-will it was not for hours, but months, nor at such times could
he be conciliated by coaxing or tears.

By degrees Florette learned to meet his discontent with a shrug of her
shoulders, and to arrange her life in her own way.