With heartfelt devotion I have always supported my home town and it has been second to no other town for me no matter how fair the laurel groves that town was steeped in. Others may boast of their Arno and the blueness of their Adriatic. I prize the town of my father and my mother. It has always lain quietly inside me when I thought of them along life's byways. I hold dear in this place and in this hour the town that was there to witness the birth of Mechthild Grossin. When I was young my father's house was full of people, full of life. That life has gradually faded and grown silent, one voice after another. My parents are dead and my brothers and sisters too. I have been left on my own and my footfall in this old house is the only one now that those of a veritable host of friends and relations have gone to echo on the stairs and in the passages and rooms. And so too I am excluded from those rooms which once were full of cheerful noise and overlook the gaudy street. I sit once again in that room that was mine as a boy and after, when I was a student in Prague. A narrow space is enough for me, a bare wall preferable to one that has been decorated. I love my garden more than the tumultuous streets and the treetops that come up as far as my windowsill give me more pleasure than the parades of noble and not so noble families, of the councillors and clergy of this gracious town of Nuremberg. I have left the proud rooms of the front of the house with their decorations, ornaments, carvings and weapons on display to the spiders and the maids. It is my youth that has brought me in old age back to my tiny schoolroom. It is my garden and the garden in which Mechthild Grossin played as a little girl and strolled in as a young woman that have brought me back here. But I did not live alone then in the small room. In the year 1390 the knight Hans Groland with his brother Ulrich had placed his Laufenholz stables in the town of Nuremberg on the open market and both brothers had sworn that neither they nor any of their descendants would sell the property to anyone other than a citizen or a citizeness of Nuremberg. When in 1392 the great bell of Saint Sebaldus was blessed, both brothers had already died and Hans's son, Michael Groland, became my father's ward and was brought to our home as no-one else wanted to take him in. My father's guardianship extended to little more than the wild young squire himself for the Groland family had managed their affairs badly from of old and for the last scion of their race little remained of ancient property rights. His parents, however, had held the stables in perpetuity from the time of Emperor Ludwig the Second of Bavaria. The wild young squire Michael was my friend and Mechthild Grossin grew up to be his bride. Their voices too are silent now and their footsteps no more heard. Tolle! Lege! Tolle! Lege!