"Brother Sebastian, indeed!" she said, "your mother might as well take a new husband as your brother a new name! Was not she married, and was not he christened in church? Is not Friedrich a good, honest name, which hundreds of your ancestors have borne? And shall we call him instead a heathen foreign name, that none of your kindred were ever known by?"
"Not heathen, grandmother," I ventured to suggest. "You remember telling us of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian by the heathen emperor?"
"Do you contradict me, child?" she exclaimed.
"Did I not know the whole martyrology before your mother was born? I say it is a heathen name. No blame to the saint if his parents were poor benighted Pagans, and knew no better name to give him; but that our Fritz should adopt it instead of his own is a disgrace. My lips at least are too old to learn such new fashioned nonsense. I shall call him the name I called him at the font and in his cradle, and no other."
Yes, Fritz! Fritz! he is to us, and shall be always. Fritz in our hearts till death!
February 15.
We have just heard that Fritz has finished his first month of probation, and has been invested with the frock of the novice. I hate to think of his thick, dark, waving hair clipped in the circle of the tonsure. But the worst part of it is the effect of his becoming a monk has had on the other boys, Christopher and Pollux.
They, who before this thought Fritz the model of everything good and great, seem repelled from all religion now. I have difficulty even in getting them to church.
Christopher said to me the other day—
"Elsè, why is a man who suddenly deserts his family to become a soldier called a villain, while the man who deserts those who depend on him to become a monk is called a saint?"