day before that the city clerk's wife was the mother
of the child upon whom she had called down misfortune and death.

The keeper of an Augsburg bath-house, who had burned herself with
boiling water, occupied the next bed. She was recovering, and was a
talkative woman, whose intrusive loquacity at first annoyed Kuni, nay,
when she could not silence it, caused her pain. But her conversation
soon revealed that she knew every stick and stone in her native city.
Kuni availed herself of this, and did not need to ask many questions to
learn everything that she desired to know about the little beggar-landed
elf.

She was Juliane, the young daughter of Herr Conrad Peutinger, the city
clerk--a girl of unusual cleverness, and a degree of learning never
before found in a child eleven years old. The bath-house keeper had many
wonderful stories to relate of her remarkable wisdom, with which even
highly educated men could not vie. In doing so, she blamed the father
and mother, who had been unnatural parents to the charming child; for
to make the marvel complete, and to gratify their own vanity, they had
taxed the little girl's mind with such foolish strenuousness that the
frail body suffered. She had heard this in her own bath-house from the
lips of the child's aunt and from other distinguished friends of the
Welsers and Peutingers. Unfortunately, these sensible women proved to
have been right; for soon after the close of the Reichstag, Juliane was
attacked by a lingering illness, from which rumour now asserted that
she would never recover. Some people even regarded the little girl's
sickness as a just punishment of God, to whom the constant devotion of
the father and his young daughter to the old pagans and their ungodly
writings must have given grave offence.

This news increased to the utmost the anxiety from which Kuni had long
suffered. Often as she thought of Lienhard, she remembered still more
frequently that it was she, who had prayed for sickness to visit the
child of a mother, who had so kindly offered her, the strolling player,
whom good women usually shunned, the shelter of her distinguished house.

The consciousness of owing a debt of gratitude to those, against whom
she had sinned so heavily, oppressed her. The kind proposal of the sick
child's mother seemed like a mockery. It was painful even to hear the
name of Peutinger.

Besides, the further she advanced toward recovery, the more unendurable
appeared the absen