When Dietegen had experienced this, he turned silently away, and from that day on avoided the whole company. Anyway, he had now attained the age when vigorous youths begin to think of making strong men of themselves. Upon the holding upon which stood the forester's house there was, from time immemorial laid the duty of maintaining three or four fully equipped fighting men, and this obligation the forester himself had always carried out most scrupulously. With great pleasure he found that Dietegen, shot up straight and nimble, would soon fill the same fine armor in which he had once hoped to see his own son. Thus Dietegen with other young gamekeepers and helpers on lengthy winter evenings went to fencing school, where he learned to make proper use of the shorter weapons, according to the methods of his home, and during the spring and summer seasons he spent many a Sunday or holiday upon spacious fields or forest clearings where the youths of the district learned to march in closed formations for hours at a stretch, and to attack, leaping broad trenches by the aid of their long spears, and in every other way to render their bodies supple, active and strong, or else, perhaps, to practice the new art of the musketeer whose weapon is loaded with powder and shot. Since by all these changes mentioned above life in the forester's house altered greatly, and since particularly the feminine doings there disturbed him sadly, although he paid scant attention to the latter, it happened that he little by little acquired the habit of frequenting the taverns where his townsfellows met much oftener than had been the case during his married life. And while absenting himself from the childish folly practiced at his own house, he succumbed to the maturer folly of men, and it would happen now and then that he would carry his head like a heavy burden, but always upright, to his forest home as late as midnight or more. Things went on in this way until, on a sunny St. John's Day, a network of events began to close in. The forester himself went to town to the headquarters of his guild, where on that festive day all were summoned to attend the settlement of important affairs concerning the craft, to conclude with a great annual feast, and he intended to remain and join there in the carousal until the advance of night. Dietegen on his part went to the sharpshooter's meeting place, intending to spend the whole long midsummer's day in perfecting himself as a marksman. The other assistants of the forester and his servants of the household also went their own way, the one to visit his relatives some distance across the country, another to the dance with his sweetheart, and the third to the holiday fair to buy himself cloth for a new coat and a pair of shoes.