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MARTIN LUTHER. THE STORY OF HIS LIFE. With frontispiece. THE LONG JOURNEY. Frontispiece in color. EMMELINE. Illustrated. KATY GAUMER. Illustrated. GETTYSBURG. Illustrated. WHEN SARAH WENT TO SCHOOL. Illustrated. WHEN SARAH SAVED THE DAY. Illustrated.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK
[Illustration: CONRAD RUBBED HIS EYES--HE LOOKED AGAIN (p. 52)]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1917
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY ELSIE SINGMASTER LEWARS
TO WILLIAM BLACK LEWARS A DESCENDANT OF JOHN CONRAD WEISER AND HIS SON CONRAD
On the evening of the twenty-third of June, Conrad Weiser brought home, as was his custom, the Gross Anspach cow. The fact was, in itself, not remarkable, since it was Conrad's chief duty to take the cow to pasture, to guard her all day long, to lead her from one little patch of green grass to another, to see that she drank from one of the springs on the hillside, and to feed her now and then a little of the precious salt which he carried in his pocket. What made this twenty-third of June remarkable was the fact that this was Conrad's final journey from the pastures of Gross Anspach to Gross Anspach village.
Liesel, the property of Conrad's father, John Conrad, was Gross Anspach's only cow. War and the occupation of a brutal soldiery had stripped the village of its property, its household goods, its animals, and, alas! of most of its young men. Gross Anspach had hidden itself in woods and in holes in the ground, had lived like animals in dens. Upon the mountainside wolves had devoured children.
What war had left undone, famine and pestilence and fearful cold had completed. The fruit trees had died, the vines were now merely stiffened and rattling stalks, and, though it was June, the earth was bare in many places. There were no young vines to plant, there was no seed to sow, there were no horses to break the soil with the plough.
Sometimes Conrad had company to the hillside pasture. He was thirteen years old, a short, sturdy, blue-eyed boy, much older than his years, as were most of the children in Gross Anspach. Above him in the family were Catrina, who was married and had two little children of her own, then Margareta, Magdalena, and Sabina, and below him were George Frederick, Christopher, Barbara, and John Frederick. They all had blue eyes and sturdy frames and they were all, except John Frederick, thin. John Frederick was their darling and the only partaker in the family of the bounty of Liesel. The fact that John Frederick had no mother seemed more terrible than the lack of a mother for any of the other eight children.