"I hope, never!" said the child with a little hesitation. "God sent him to us, and I love him. But it would be nice if dear Hans sometimes washed his face!"
Magdalis smiled, and hit on a plan for bringing this about. With some difficulty she persuaded the old man to take his dinner every Sunday and holiday with them, and she always set an ewer of water—and a towel, relic of her old burgher life—by him, before the meal.
"We were a kind of Pharisees in our home," she said, "and except we washed our hands, never ate bread."
Hans growled a little, but he took the hint, for her sake and the boy's, and gradually found the practice so pleasant on its own account, that the washing of his hands and face became a daily process.
On his patron saint's day (St. John, February 8), Mother Magdalis went a step further, and presented him with a clean suit of clothes, very humble but neat and sound, of her own making out of old hoards. Not for holidays only, she said, but that he might change his clothes every day, after work, as her Berthold used.
"Dainty burgher ways," Hans called them, but he submitted, and Gottlieb was greatly comforted, and thought his old friend a long way advanced in his transformation into an angel.
So, between the sweetness of the boy's temper and of the dear mother's love which folded him close, the bitter was turned into sweet within him.
But Ursula, who heard the mocking of the boys with indignation, was not so wise in her consolations.
"Wicked, envious little devils!" said she. "Never thou heed them, my lamb! They would be glad enough, any of them, to be the master's angel, or Dwarf Hans's darling, for that matter, if they could. It is nothing but mean envy and spite, my little prince, my little wonder; never thou heed them!"
And then the enemy crept unperceived into the child's heart.