Purifying powers dwell in undeserved suffering, but no one is made better
by unmerited disgrace, least of all a man like Adam. He had done what
seemed to him his duty, without looking to the right or the left, but now
the stainless man felt himself dishonored, and with morbid sensitiveness
referred everything he saw and heard to his own disgrace, while the
inhabitants of the little town made him feel that he had been ill-
advised, when he ventured to make a fiddler's daughter a citizen.

When he went out, it seemed to him--and usually unjustly--as if people
were nudging each other; hands, pointing out-stretched fingers at him,
appeared to grow from every eye. At home he found nothing but
desolation, vacuity, sorrow, and a child, who constantly tore open the
burning, gnawing wounds in his heart. Ulrich must forget "the viper,"
and he sternly forbade him to speak of his mother; but not a day passed
on which he would not fain have done so himself.

The smith did not stay long in the house on the market-place. He wished
to go to Freiburg or Ulm, any place where he had not been with her. A
purchaser for the dwelling, with its lucrative business, was speedily
found, the furniture was packed, and the new owner was to move in on
Wednesday, when on Monday Bolz, the jockey, came to Adam's workshop from
Richtberg. The man had been a good customer for years, and bought
hundreds of shoes, which he put on the horses at his own forge, for he
knew something about the trade. He came to say farewell; he had his own
nest to feather, and could do a more profitable business in the lowlands
than up here in the forest. Finally he offered Adam his property at a
very low price.

The smith had smiled at the jockey's proposal, still he went to the
Richtberg the very next day to see the place. There stood the