s life. The elder, Anna, aged 13, was
forward with her education, as she was well acquainted with German
literature and was reading Latin with her father[19]; by the following
summer she would be ready to come to Heppach. For the younger, who was
not yet 7, he begged a few years' grace, though she was eager to come
at once. Truly children developed earlier in those days.

[19] quae legere literas vernaculae linguae satis expedite
nouit, nunc per patrem imbuitur Latinis.

The happiest time of Ellenbog's life began in the summer of 1522, when
after ten years' service he was allowed by the Abbot to resign his
Stewardship. His accounts were audited satisfactorily, and he was
discharged, to what seemed to him a riotous banquet of leisure. 'In
the quiet of my cell,' he wrote to his brother, 'I read, I write, I
meditate, I pray, I paint, I carve'. His interest in astronomy was
resumed, and he set himself to make dials for pocket use, on metal
rings or on round wooden sticks. The latter he turned for himself upon
a lathe; and for this work John sent him a present of boxwood,
juniper, and plane. By the New Year of 1523 he had made two sundials;
one which showed the time on five sides at once, he sent to John at
Wurtzen, the other to Barbara at Heppach. His cell looked South, and
thus he could study the movements of the moon and the planets, and
note the southing of the stars. He could turn his skill to profit,
too, and exchange his dials for pictures of the saints.

In 1525 his peace was broken by the Peasants' Revolt, which swept like
a hurricane over South Germany. Hostility to religion was not one of
its moving causes, but the monks were vulnerable, and had always been
considered fair game, especially by local nobles whom in the plenitude
of their power they had not troubled to conciliate. The peasants of
the Rhine valley had not forgotten the burning of Limburg, near
Spires, by William of Hesse in 1504. The abbey church had scarcely a
rival in Germany, and the flames burned for twelve days. With such an
example, and with their prey unresisting, the peasants were not likely
to stay their hands. At Freiburg they brought to his death Gregory
Reisch, the learned Carthusian Prior of St. Johannisberg, the friend
of Maximilian. Ellenbog enumerates four monasteries burned in his
neighbourhood during the outbreak--three by the peasants incensed
against their landlords, and one by a noble who bore it a grudge. When
t