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the confessions of the old ladies, their thoughts, the monotonous relations of their troubled dispositions, their inward sorrows and sore temptations were not quickening to him. Young himself he felt an attraction towards young people. Owing to this very human cause the instruction which he had to impart to the young maidens of the cloister-school, was not so burdensome as that bestowed on the classes of the Sapientia. Fresh and blooming as beauteous buds just bursting from their shells sat the girls and children before him, and listened eagerly to every word he spoke. They understood intuitively what he wished, and in that breath of love and admiration, which met him on all sides, it seemed to him as if his parched soul lived again, and as if feelings awoke once more, which had slumbered since he saw the pale thin woman, who had watched over him during his youth, borne away in her coffin. If when in the College he had rejoiced that his lessons were over, now did he willingly place himself at the head of his young ones, and accompany them in their walks around the convent meadows. Above at the spring house, lower down sitting under the spreading beeches he taught the children to build altars, and wind wreaths. He showed them how the beloved angels vanished through bushes, or looked down as clouds from heaven and bore away a greeting from each child to the Mother of God. At other times he drilled the young ones into forming processions and pilgrimages, teaching them to sing guileless texts adapted from catholic books. Thus could the children play at being catholics without the parents becoming aware of it. It is true that once the miller's wife complained that her little daughter had burnt the name of the Holy Mary in her arm, and that Reinhard had cut the same in an apple-tree. The Domina however calmed her by saying that through that the little maiden would not get a fever, and that the apple-tree would bear a double crop. The Magister had also quiet talks concerning the welfare of the soul with the older girls, and the maidens acknowledged, that they had never before conceived how bad, how in reality wicked they were, but their heavenly good Magister knew how to console them so lovingly, that they had never been so happy as at the present moment. But how came it to pass that about this time Lydia Erast took to complaining that recently in their games the less agreeable positions were always given to her, and that whe
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