“No, my child, the chill air of the Wartburg is not for such a tender plant as thou.”
So she would wait outside, she and the sunbeams together, until her father’s rounds were finished.
It was a simple, wholesome life that Katrina led, even though it was within the walls of one of the most noted of all the ancient castles. Her parents, good, honest folk, were poor, and realized that their child would have to face the sterner side of life. She was, they said, already too dreamful and imaginative, so they taught her to be practical, and, as far as possible, hid the romance of the castle from her view.
But by degrees much that was weird, as well as romantic, began to weave itself about the child’s more practical existence like bright threads woven into gray. And little by little, through a means singularly strange, she came to be familiar with many of the legends and historic tales relating to this old Thuringian fortress.
Now, living, as she did, far up on this lonely hilltop, Katrina had few companions. But there was one who had been her playmate always, and that was Fritz Albrecht, of Eisenach, the toymaker’s son.
Fritz, to be sure, was five years older than Katrina, but this only served to make the lad feel responsible as her protector. When a very little boy, his mother had read to him tales of knighthood and valour; and now, even though the mother he had loved so dearly had been taken from him, the seeds of chivalry she had sown in his heart promised to be fruitful.
It was a quaint little house in which Fritz and his father lived, and where the latter had his workshop. But quainter still was the house that faced them across the narrow street paved with cobblestones, and on which Fritz was accustomed to look daily.
From his frequent visits to it, the boy knew every room in this old house with its queer gables and red-tiled roof. But never would he forget the day, not long before she died, when his mother had taken him into a certain small room over the entrance, and, holding his chubby hand in hers, had said, in her gentle fashion:
“My little Fritz, thou art in the room which sheltered the great Martin Luther when he was a lad scarcely older than thyself. Ponder well what I am telling thee, and when thou art older thou must learn about the splendid work that Luther did. And there,” the mother added, as she pointed to the portrait of a sweet-faced woman, “is the good Widow Cotta. It was she who heard little Martin Luther singing in the streets, and, out of the goodness of her mother-heart, for she had children of her own, took him in and gave him a home here with her own family.”
That was all his mother had told him about Martin Luther, but it aroused in Fritz a desire to know more about the boy who had earned the money to go to school by singing carols in these same streets where he, Fritz, walked every day.