"All hail and blessings to the cloister-pupil Burkhard!"
"Thou, who hast been an eye-witness of thy uncle's sorrow, wilt know how to be silent. Do not try to find out where he is now, but remember that God is everywhere. Thou hast read in Procopius how Gelimer, the king of the Vandals, when he was a prisoner in the Numidian hills, and when his misery was great, entreated his enemies to give him a harp, so that he might give voice to his grief. Thy mother's brother now begs thee, to give to the bearer of this, one of your small harps, as well as some sheets of parchment, colours and pens, for my heart in its loneliness, also feels inclined to sing a song. Burn this letter. God's blessing be with thee! Farewell!"
"Thou must be wary and cautious, as if thou wert going to take the young ones out of an eagle's nest," Ekkehard said to the goat-boy. "Ask for the cloister-pupil, who was with Romeias the watchman, when the Huns came. To him thou art to give the letter. Nobody else need know about it."
The goat-boy, putting his forefinger to his lips, replied with a knowing look: "With us no tales are repeated. The mountain-air teaches one to keep a secret."
Two days afterwards he returned from his expedition, and unpacked the contents of his wicker-basket before Ekkehard's cavern. A small harp, with ten strings, three-cornered so as to imitate a Greek delta; colours and writing material, and a quantity of clean, soft parchment-leaves with ruled lines, lay all carefully hidden under a mass of green oak-leaves.
The goat-boy however looked sullen and gloomy.
"Thou hast done thy business well," said Ekkehard.
"Another time, I won't go down there," grumbled the boy, clenching his fist.
"Why not?"
"Because there is no room for such as I. In the hall, I enquired for the pupil, and gave him the letter. After that, I felt rather curious to see what nice young saints those might be, who went to school there, with their monks' habits. So I went to the garden where the young gentlemen were playing with dice, and drinking, as it was a recreation day. I looked on, at their throwing stones at a mark, and playing a game with sticks, and I could not help laughing, because it was all so weak and miserable. And when they asked me, what I was laughing at, I took up a stone, and threw it twenty paces further than the best of them, and cried out: what a set of green-beaks you are! Upon this, they tried to get at me with their sticks; but I seized the one next to me, and sent him flying through the air, so that he dropped into the grass like a lamed mountain-rook; and then they all cried out that I was a coarse mountain-lout, and that their strength lay in science and intellect. Then I wanted to know what intellect was, and they said: drink some wine, and afterwards we will write it on thy back! And the cloister-wine being good, I drank a few jugs full, and they wrote something on my back. I do not remember how it was all done, for the next morning I had a very bad headache, and did not know any more about their intellect, than I had done before."