Even among the vegetables we had not free scope, for beans came under the ban as being too weighty a food and making one heavy in spirit; but above all things our leader held that the spirit of this art since it is of such virgin purity can suffer no love between man and woman; for love in young hearts inflames them so exceedingly as to make the sufferers entirely unfit in mind and heart and voice and spirit. And, indeed, to this extent I agree fully with our leader, that people in love are not only useless for music but for almost everything else. As to drink, our brother taught it had been settled long ago that in the straight path there is naught hath greater righteousness than the innocent, pure water just as it comes from the well, or made into soup to which a little bread was added. Otherwise, all cookery whereby water is deprived of its beneficent nature and changed by unseeming art into a sort of delicacy our leader ever regarded as sinful, an abomination of abominations. After our leader had assumed the rôle of _Capellmeister_, singing schools were held upon certain evenings in the Sister House, the sessions lasting four hours, during the third, fourth, and fifth, and sixth hours, corresponding in wordly time from eight o'clock to midnight; and so on this night, the brethren being in snow-white garments, which our ruler insisted upon as representing the necessary purity of heart and mind, he himself strictly adhering to this, met us as usual at the low doorway of Bethania and led us in long procession to the Sister _Saal_, the Sisters proceeding thither from Saron in the same manner, led by the prioress. The Brethren as usual took their places, being divided in their respective classes about their proper tables on the floor of the _Saal_ while the Sisters took the places set apart for them behind the latticed galleries above. It was seldom we sang through an entire session of these evening schools that some brother or sister did not receive a severe scolding from our leader; for he ruled these classes with an iron hand, so that often there were bitterest dissensions where all should have been peace; for at the slightest sign of levity or frivolity there would descend upon the offender such an avalanche of rebukes and scoldings as were, indeed, hard to bear even by the meekest of us.