“Mother Kaufmann, we will go back to the kinderhaus,” said Walda Kellar. She spoke the German so that it seemed the most musical tongue Everett had ever heard. The elder woman rolled up her knitting and put it into the capacious pocket of her gingham apron.
“Gerson Brandt, thy boys are truly well behaved; thou hast done much with them.”
Walda spoke to the school-master, who bestowed upon her a look of gratitude and tenderness.
“It is thou who tamest all that is unruly in the children of Zanah,” he said. And then he walked down the narrow aisle between the rows of tow-headed urchins and flung open the door that she might pass out.
“Come hither, friend Everett,” said Adolph Schneider, advancing to the platform, where he met the school-master. “I want to make you acquainted with Brother Brandt. Brother Brandt might have had that bubble men call fame if he had continued to disobey the law of the Lord, for he made images of the earth and sky, which is forbidden in the commandments. But he forsook his idols before he was one-and-twenty and came into the safe refuge of Zanah.”
“Yet even now I long to behold great pictures,” declared Gerson Brandt, as if he were confessing some secret vice. “It is a quarter of a century since I have looked on one.”
“Tut, tut, Brother Brandt,” said Schneider; “if thou wilt talk of forbidden things, dismiss thy pupils.”
The school-master lifted his hand, and with a benediction sent the tow-headed boys homeward. The village fool alone of all the school remained in his place. With his head bent forward he appeared to be asleep.
“We have come to see thy books,” said Adolph Schneider, when he had taken the only chair in the room and placed his cane against the black-board. “Is that thy Bible that thou hast put so much work upon?” He pointed to the big volume from which Walda had been reading. It had a linen cover neatly sewn upon it, and might have been the wordbook so much thumbed by the pupils.
Gerson Brandt went to the desk, and, putting his hand on the book, answered: