My father was an armourer and president of the guild. All looked up to him as the most fearless and far-seeing of our counsellors. He taught us how to watch and to resist the encroachments of the bishop and the nobles. We have to thank his wisdom mainly that our position has been not a little strengthened of late. Still, how much wrong have we oftentimes to suffer from the senate and their presidents! Strasburg prospers—marvellously, considering the dreadful pestilence seven years back; but there is much to amend, Heaven knows! My father fell on a journey to Spires, in an affray with Von Otterbach and his black band. He could use well the weapons he made, and wounded Von Otterbach well nigh to the death before he was overpowered by numbers. The Rhenish League was strong enough, and for once bold enough, to avenge him well. That castle of Otterbach, which every traveller and merchant trembled to pass, stands now ruinous and empty. I, alas! was away the while, on my apprentice-travels. The old evil is but little abated, though our union has, I doubt not, prevented many of the worst mischiefs of the fist-law. Every rock along the Rhine is castled. They espy us approaching from far off, and at every turn have we to wrangle, and now and then, if strong enough, to fight, with these vultures about their robber-toll. Right thankful am I that my father died a man’s death, fighting—that I have not to imagine his fate as like that of some, who, falling alive into their hands, have been horribly tortured, and let down by a windlass, with dislocated limbs, into the loathsome dog-hole of a keep, to writhe and die by inches in putrid filth and darkness. Yet our very perils give to our calling an enterprise and an excitement it would otherwise lack. The merchant has his chivalry as well as the knight. Moreover, as rich old Gersdorf says, risk and profit run together—though, as to money, I have as much already as I care for. We thrive, despite restrictions and extortions innumerable, legal and illegal. My brother Otto sends me word from Bohemia that he prospers. The Bohemian throats can never have enough of our wines, and we are good customers for their metal. Otto was always a rover. He talks of journeying to the East. It seems but yesterday that he and I were boys together, taking our reading and writing lessons from that poor old Waldensian whom my father sheltered in our house. How we all loved him! I never saw my father so troubled at anything as at his death. Our house has been ever since a refuge for such persecuted wanderers.