gayety and joyous
life! True, he was no light-hearted lad, but, lying under the apple-tree
in the month of May, he saw himself in imagination living happily and
merrily in the smithy by the market-place, with the fair-haired girl who
had already shed tears for him. At last he started up, and because he
had determined to go still farther on this day, did so, though for no
other reason than to carry out the plan formed the day before. The next
morning, before sunrise, he was again marching along the highway, this
time not forward towards the Black Forest, but back to Nordlingen.

That very evening Florette became his betrothed bride, and the following
Tuesday his wife.

The wedding was celebrated in the midst of the turmoil of the fair.
Strolling players, jugglers and buffoons were the witnesses, and there
was no lack of music and tinsel.

A quieter ceremony would have been more agreeable to the plain citizen
and sensible blacksmith, but this purgatory had to be passed to reach
Paradise.

On Wednesday he went off in a fair wagon with his young wife, and
in Stuttgart bought with a portion of his savings many articles of
household furniture, less to stop the gossips' tongues, of which he took
no heed, than to do her honor in his own eyes. These things, piled high
in a wagon of his own, he had sent into his native town as Florette's
dowry, for her whole outfit consisted of one pink and one grass-green
gown, a lute and a little white dog.

A delightful life now began in the smithy for Adam. The gossips avoided
his wife, but they 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 desp