"Well, then, sit down,--we cannot have any school to-day. My dear children, I must take leave of you. I cannot teach you any more. God has taken from me my eyesight. I cannot see you nor your lessons, and therefore I can no longer be your schoolmaster. Your parents will consider my blindness a punishment from God for my conduct, but I tell you, if the trials God sends us are rightly borne they are not punishments, but benefits. Remember this all your lives long. There will come dark hours in every one of your lives, if you live to grow up, when you will understand what your old master meant. And now come and give me your hands, one after the other. So,--I thank you for your childlike tenderness and affection, and I forgive from the bottom of my heart those few who have ever given me any trouble. My son will soon be here in my place; promise me to obey him, and to make his duty easier for him by diligence and obedience. Farewell, my dear children. God bless and prosper you!"
He held out his hands, and the children, sobbing and crying, thronged around him to clasp and kiss them.
"Who is this?" the old man asked of each one, and then, as the names were told him, he shook the little hands.
"Do not cry, dear children, we are not bidding farewell for life. You will often pass by the school-house on Sunday and shake hands with your old master as he sits on his bench before the door. And then I can guess by the voice who it is, and can feel how much you have grown, and you can tell me what you have been learning during the week. And those who have studied the best shall have some nuts, or one of my loveliest flowers, or some other little gift. Won't that be delightful?"
The children were consoled by this prospect, and hastened home to tell the important news to their parents.
The old man stood alone with his wife in the deserted school-room. "Come, dear wife, we will send a message to Walter." He laid his hands once more upon his desk, and tears fell from his eyes. "It is strange," he said, "how much it costs us to leave a spot where we have laboured so long, even although our work has been hard and ill rewarded. Our home is wherever we have been used to the consciousness of duties fulfilled, and when we must leave it, it is as if we were going among strangers!"
He put his arm in Brigitta's, and, with heard bent, crossed the threshold which separated him from the humble scene of the daily labour of his life. For the first time, he looked, to his wife's anxious eyes, like a broken-down old man.
"I must leave you alone for an hour," she said, when she had seated him in the dwelling-room on the bench by the stove. "I must prepare the dinner."
"Do so, mother; man must eat, whether he be merry or sorrowful, eh? And we are not really sorrowful, are we?" And he forced a smile and patted her shoulder.
"No, dear Bernhard, we are not!" said his wife, struggling to repress a fresh burst of tears.