These possibilities of education attracted boys from all parts of the country, and added a new class of vagrants to the tramps of all kinds who infested the roads during the later Middle Ages. The wandering scholar, with his yellow scarf, was a feature of the era, and frequently not a reputable one. He was usually introduced as a character into the _Fastnachtspiele_, or rude popular carnival comedies, and was almost always a rogue and often a thief. Children of ten and twelve years of age left their villages, in charge of an older student, to join some famous school. But these older students were too often mere vagrants, with just learning enough to impose upon the simple peasantry, to whom they sold charms against toothache and other troubles. The young children entrusted to them by confiding parents were often treated with the greatest cruelty, employed by them to beg or steal food, and sent round to the public-houses with cans to beg for beer. The small unfortunates were the prisoners, the slaves, of their disreputable masters, and many of them died by the roadside. We need not wonder that Luther, with his memory full of these wandering students, in after days denounced the system by which men spent sometimes “twenty and even forty years” in a so-called student life, which was often one of the lowest vagrancy and debauchery, and in the end knew neither German nor Latin, “to say nothing,” he adds with honest indignation, “of the shameful and vicious life by which our worthy youth have been so grievously corrupted.” Two or three of the autobiographies of these wandering students have survived; and two of them, those of Thomas Platter and of Johann Butzbach, belong to Luther’s time, and give a vivid picture of their lives.(26)