And he would have been still harsher and sterner but for his mother's intercession.
A pleasant smile hovered around his lips as he remembered her.

Instead of continuing to listen to the Greek sentences which Herr Wilibald Pirckheimer was reading aloud to the others, he could not help thinking of the pious, gentle little woman who, with her cheerful kindness, so well understood how to comfort and to sustain courage.

She never railed or scolded; at the utmost she only wiped her eyes with her apron when the farmers of his little native town in Hesse sent to the schoolmaster, for the school tax, grain too bad for bread, hay too sour for the three goats, and half-starved fowls.
He thoughtfully patted the plump abdomen which, thanks to the fleshpots of The Blue Pike, had grown so rotund in his fifteen years of service.
"It pays better to provide for people's bodies than for their brains," he said to himself.

"The Nuremberg and Augsburg gentlemen outside are rich folk's children.

For them learning is only the raisins, almonds, and citron in the cake; knowledge agrees with them better than it did with my father.