ish boys and girls living now in the nineteenth century, carry
their minds back so far in time as to the period when our Henry the
Fourth was reigning in England, and can they travel in thought so far
distant as to the country called Germany, and picture to themselves the
life of a little boy at that time and in that country? If so, we will
tell them something of the life of Hans Gensfleisch, the only son of a
poor widow, who lived about the beginning of the fifteenth century, not
far from Mainz, or Mayence, a city built on the banks of the river
Rhine, about half-way between its source and the sea. The father of Hans
had been a dyer, and had at one time carried on rather a thriving
business in Mainz; but after his death Frau[1] Gensfleisch had gone with
her son to live at a little village called Steinheim, about three miles
from the city walls, where, on a few acres of land, bought with her
husband's savings, and laid out partly as garden, and partly as field
and vineyard, she contrived to live with this, her only child. Hans and
his mother cultivated the little garden, sowed their own crops of barley
and flax in their little fields, and tended and trained the vines in
their small vineyard. Strong and active, and fond of employment, the
life of the little Hans was one long course of busy industry, from the
sowing of seeds in Spring to the gathering in of their small vintage
late in the Autumn. And in the long winter nights, there was always too
much to do within the cottage walls, by the light of their pine wood
fire, for him ever to find the time hang heavy on his hands. One night
he would be busy helping his mother to comb and hackle her little store
of flax; on another he would mend the net, with which he at times
contrived to catch his mother a river fish or two for supper; and it
would be _play_ to him when nothing else was wanting his help, to
go on with the making of a cross-bow and arrows with which he intended
some day to bring down many a wild duck or wood-pigeon.

The principal occupation of Hans was, however, to assist his mother in
carrying on some part of her husband's former trade; she having become
acquainted with many of the secrets of the art by which colors could be
extracted from plants and mineral substances, so as to give to wool,
flax, and silk, bright and unchanging colors. In those days such
operations, instead of being carried on in large factories and
workshops, and by wholesale as it were for