For that spirit of labor and patience I made daily prayer,--for I was frequently praying now. I tried indeed to remember Luther’s mandate--to trust, to work, and not to question curiously; but incessantly I read the new, strange book--the Bible. A Vulgate, a Septuagint, an Erasmus’s Greek New Testament I had brought from Wittenberg--and I read them with all the avidity with which as a young lad I had first devoured the tomes of Cicero. I tried to forget the issues of doctrine, the pressing matters of debate and doubt; to read, to read, and ever again to read--and I marvelled more and more. Here was a new world to me; a world of eternal spiritual values, and I entered into it with that keen and novel delight the exploring Spaniards must enjoy in the Indies when bursting upon some silver city ruled by a golden-clad cazique and his feather-crowned warriors. I remember how late, very late one night I closed the volume. I had just finished reading the great argument of Job. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” “O foolish Grecians and Latinists,” I cried aloud to my empty chamber; “will ye indeed praise Euripides and Lucretius and withhold your praise from this!” And every night I launched out upon my voyagings of discovery,--now in Genesis, now in Isaiah, now in the Gospels,--and always found that which rewarded me more than all the precious silks and porcelains from Zipango or Cathay. A personal record this? Yes,--but I tell no secrets: my experience was that of a myriad others up and down broad Germany, who were for the first time learning to find the imperishable gold, prompted by the lessons of the friar of Wittenberg. Thus for some months I worked, read, studied, and strove to crush all thoughts of Ilsa from my heart. * * * * * In October came a break in my chosen routine. Thus it came. Pseudo-friars who eked out scanty alms by thievery, and masterless rogues who had turned poachers, had plagued us all the summer; but now one morning Adolf came dancing in to me with gleeful eyes and an excited story. “A right true robber” had been found on the Regenstein lands. He had pillaged hen-roosts for some nights at Plattenberg, and last night a farmer, one Gustav Lampe, had waited behind his barn, suspecting an inroad. By the light of the moon he had caught the rascal in the act and article of making off with a game bag of choice poultry, and had pounced upon him. But the robber had whipped out a knife as long as one’s arm, and left poor Lampe helpless beside the hay cock, with a desperately wounded shoulder. Lampe had raised a great clamor. The neighbors had turned out. The thief had dropped his bag, and run for dear life to the western woods towards Michaelstein, and there he was surely hiding. At first dawn they had come to the castle for dogs, horses, and weapons, and “they did not doubt his Countly Grace would bestir himself.”