Now for the first time I began truly to labor for what did not concern that most unsatisfactory thing called myself. That a man of parts and fortune owed anything in the way of service to his fellow-men, beyond observing the polite social conventionalities, is something I learned from no preceptor in Padua, Bologna, or Florence. But I strove to make amends now; and perhaps the mere novelty of the task made it the more pleasing. With all the energy that in me lay I applied myself to studying and bettering the condition of my peasants. Here were over a thousand folk with immortal souls, dwelling in the Regenstein and the hamlets around it, and I their absolute lord and master, with “imperial right of pit and gallows”; in other words, with power to consign them to any form of misery, including the grave. My father had left his German lordship largely to Adolf’s rough rule and fostering, and the latter shaggy individual had dispensed a severe but at least impartial justice. Now, however, I resolved to prove that because a nobleman spoke Latin and read Greek, he was not incapacitated for studying the needs of his dependants. My first step was to dismiss upon a meagre pension Father Jakob, the chaplain who had too long afflicted the Regenstein with the mouthings which he had called homilies, and with his irregular life. The first Sunday after my return I had caught him in the buttery, eating soup previous to saying mass. “Magister Jakob,” said I, raising my eyebrows, “do you not know that this is forbidden by the Church?” “Nonsense, Countly Grace,” had been his answer, between the smacking spoonfuls. “The Saviour gets through bolts and locks; and this soup won’t stop the holy wafer.” I left him to continue his feast, but when that day in the crowded chapel he spent the whole sermon hour talking endlessly about the manner of raiment worn by the angel who appeared to Mary,--whether with white, red, or variegated clothes, and about the precise aspect of St. Joseph, my wrath boiled over. My first duty to the Regenstein was to see that the simple piety of my peasants was not polluted longer by such as he.