When at last deep silence again gathered round him, the prisoner tried his books afresh.  The Father had provided for a varied taste.  The “Devotion to the Holy Rosary,” the “Prayers to the Virgin’s Heart,” “Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell,” the “Life of St. Theresa,” “The Seven Bolts of Heaven,” and “Prayers of Intercession for Souls in Distress.”  What a wealth of edification!  The joiner’s apprentice had always loved books.  He had once reckoned out as a joke that three asses could not carry the books which he had read since his childhood.  They had afforded him a glimpse of all times and places, and of all provinces of human life.  Now he asked himself what it had all brought him.  Confusion, perplexity, nothing besides.  He had thought about everything, but he could not be clear about anything.  That was not generally possible, he had read in one of the books, and the statement pacified him.  He had read all kinds of theological books, had easily and trustfully given himself up to the echo of words heard in childhood, but it had not gone deeper.  Now that they ought to prove their worth, they left him in the lurch.  He turned over the pages, he read and prayed and sought, and found nothing to relieve his need.  Discouraged, he pushed the books away from him, and some of them fell over the edge of the table on to the brick floor.

In the night that followed Konrad had a dream, vivid and clear as never dream had been.  It was a dark country, and he had lost his way.  He wandered about amid cold, damp rocks, and could not find a path.  Then his fingers felt a thread; he seized it, and it guided him through the darkness.  The land grew brighter and brighter; the thread brought him into his sunny native valley, to the place with the old gabled houses, to his father’s house which stood amidst the fruit-trees, and the thread to which his fingers still clung involuntarily led him into the room where it had been spun from his mother’s distaff.  And there she sat and span the thread, with her pale face and soft wrinkles and kind eyes, and directly the boy stood near her she told him tales of the Saviour.  He listened to her and was a happy child.  That was his dream.  And when he awoke in the prison cell, his mother’s gentle voice still sounded in his ears:  “My child, you must cling to Jesus.”

Konrad was taken every day for half an hour into the dirty and sunless courtyard.  But he dreaded that half-hour.  It stirred a vain longing for light.  And the rough and insolent fellow-prisoners with whom he was brought in contact!  He preferred to be alone in his quiet cell.