ained me courteously and agreeably for
two days. Here I accidentally found Hermann Busch.

From Speyer I travelled by carriage to Worms, and from there again to
Mainz. There was an Imperial secretary, Ulrich Varnbueler,[76] travelling
by chance in the same carriage. He devoted himself to me with incredible
assiduity over the whole journey, and at Mainz would not allow me to go
into the inn but took me to the house of a canon; on my departure he
accompanied me to the boat. The voyage was not unpleasant as the weather
was fine, excepting that the crew took care to make it somewhat long; in
addition to this the stench of the horses incommoded me. For the first
day John Langenfeld, who formerly taught at Louvain, and a lawyer friend
of his came with me as a mark of politeness. There was also a
Westphalian, John, a canon at St. Victor's outside Mainz, a most
agreeable and entertaining man.

After arriving at Boppard, as I was taking a walk along the bank while a
boat was being procured, someone recognized me and betrayed me to the
customs officer, 'That is the man.' The customs officer's name is, if I
mistake not, Christopher Cinicampius, in the common speech Eschenfelder.
You would not believe how the man jumped for joy. He dragged me into his
house. Books by Erasmus were lying on a small table amongst the customs
agreements. He exclaimed at his good fortune and called in his wife and
children and all his friends. Meanwhile he sent out to the sailors who
were calling for me two tankards of wine, and another two when they
called out again, promising that when he came back he would remit the
toll to the man who had brought him a man like myself. From Boppard John
Flaminius, chaplain to the nuns there, a man of angelic purity, of sane
and sober judgement and no common learning, accompanied me as far as
Coblenz. At Coblenz Matthias, Chancellor to the Bishop, swept us off to
his house--he is a young man but of staid manners, and has an accurate
knowledge of Latin, besides being a skilled lawyer. There we supped
merrily.

At Bonn the canon left us, to avoid Cologne: I wanted to avoid Cologne
myself, but the servant had preceded me thither with the horses, and
there was no reliable person in the boat whom I could have charged with
the business of calling back my servant; I did not trust the sailors. So
we docked at Cologne before six o'clock in the morning on a Sunday, the
weather being by now pestilential. I went into an inn an