The monotony and the hardships of his daily life were alleviated by his cheerfulness. His intercourse with friends and pupils was rendered more stimulating and attractive, and in many cases more useful. Under cover of a jest he was often able to enforce good instruction more easily and almost without its being noticed. His cheerful way of looking at things often enabled Luther lightheartedly to surmount difficulties from which others would have shrunk. There is not the slightest doubt that his extraordinary influence over those who came into contact with him was due in no small part to his kindly addiction to pleasantry. It was indeed no usual thing to see such mighty energy as he devoted to the world-struggle, so agreeably combined with a keen gift of observation, with an understanding for the most trivial details of daily life, and, above all, with such refreshing frankness and such a determination to amuse his hearers. In order to dispel the anxiety felt by Catherine Bora during her husband’s absence, he would send her letters full of affection and of humorous accounts of his doings. He tells her, for instance, how, in consequence of her excessive fears for him “which hindered her from sleeping,” everything about him had conspired to destroy him; how a fire “at our inn just next door to our room” had tried to burn him, how a heavy rock had fallen in order to kill him; “the rock really had a mind to justify your solicitude, but the holy angels prevented it.”[1252] In such cheerful guise does he relate little untoward incidents. “You try to take care of your God,” he writes to her in a letter already quoted, “just as though He were not Almighty and able to create ten Dr. Martins were the old one to be drowned in the Saale, suffocated in the coal-hole, or eaten up by the wolf.”[1253] He was also joking, when, about the same time, i.e. during his stay with the Counts of Mansfeld, he used the words which recently were taken all too seriously by a Catholic polemist and made to constitute a charge against Luther’s morals: “At present, thank God, I am well, only that I am so beset by pretty women as once more to fear for my chastity.”[1254] The irony with which he frequently speaks and writes of both himself and his friends is often not free from frivolity; we may recall, for instance, his ill-timed jest concerning his three wives;[1255] or his report to Catherine from Eisleben: “On the whole we have enough to gorge and swill, and should have a jolly time were this tiresome business to let us.”[1256] The last passage reminds us of his words elsewhere: I feed like a Bohemian and swill like a German.[1257] Among other jests at Catherine’s expense we find in the Table-Talk the threat that soon the time will come when “we men shall be allowed several wives,” words which perhaps are a humorous echo of the negotiations concerning the Hessian bigamy.[1258]