. He was then
committed to an orphan asylum to be given "a right religious education."
It's a queer old world, Terese, and what would have become of Gerhard
Gerhards had he fallen heir to his father's titles and estate, no man
can say. He might have accumulated girth and become an honored
burgomaster. As it was he became powder-monkey to a monk, and scrubbed
stone floors and rushed the growler for cowled and pious prelates.

Then he did copying for the Abbe, and proved himself a boy from Missouri
Valley.

He was small, blue-eyed, fair-haired, slender, slight, with a long nose
and sharp features. "With this nose," said Albrecht Durer, many years
later, "he successfully hunted down everything but heresy."

At eighteen he became a monk and proudly had his flaxen poll tonsured.
His superior was fond of him, and prophesied that he would become a
bishop or something.

Children do not suffer much, nor long. God is good to them. They slide
into an environment and accept it. This child learned to dodge the big
bare feet of the monks--got his lessons, played a little, worked his wit
against their stupidity, and actually won their admiration--or as much
of it as men who are alternately ascetics and libertines can give.

It was about this time that the lad was taunted with having no name.
"Then I'll make one for myself," was his proud answer.

Having entered now upon his novitiate, he was allowed to take a new
name, and being dead to the world, the old one was forgotten.

They called him Brother Desiderius, or the Desired One. He then amended
this Latin name with its Greek equivalent, Erasmus, which means
literally the Well-Beloved. As to his pedigree, or lack of it, he was
needlessly proud. It set him apart as different. He had half-brothers
and half-sisters, and these he looked upon as strangers. When they came
to see him, he said, "There is no relationship between souls save that
of the spirit."

His sense of wit came in when he writes to a friend: "Two parents are
the rule; no parents the exception; a mother but no father is not
uncommon; but I had a father and never had a mother. I was nursed by a
man, and educated by monks, all of which shows that women are more or
less of a superfluity in creation. God Himself is a man. He had one son,
but no daughters. The cherubim are boys. All of the angels are
masculine, and so far as Holy Writ informs us, there are no women in
heaven."

That it was a woman, however, to whom E