She took the little bundle in her right hand, saying “I have something for your Bessie.  My Wilhelm, good fellow—­”

Here she paused and restored her gift to its old place.  She had seen the Junker’s plucked present, and continued in an altered tone:  “So you already have a pigeon—­so much the better!  The city clerk’s little girl is beginning to droop too.  I’ll see you to-morrow, if God wills.”

She was about to go, but Georg stopped her, saying:  “You are mistaken, my good lady.  I shot that bird to-day, I’ll confess now, Frau Barbara; my corvus is a wretched crow.”

“I thought so,” cried the widow.  “Such an abomination!”

Yet she thrust her finger into the bird’s breast, saying:  “But there’s meat on the creature.”

“A crow!” cried Wilhelm’s mother, clasping her hands.  “True, dogs and cats are already hanging on many a spit and have wandered into many a pan.  There is the pigeon.”

Barbara unwrapped the bird as carefully, as if it might crumble under her fingers, gazing tenderly at it as she weighed it carefully in her hand; but the musician’s mother said: 

“It’s the fourth one Wilhelm has killed, and he said it would have been a good flier.  He intended it specially for your Bessie.  Stuff it nicely with yellow paste, not too solid and a little sweetened.  That is what children like, and it will agree with her, for it is cheerfully given.  Put the little thing away.  When we have known any creature, we feel sorry to see it dead.”

“May God reward you!” cried Barbara, pressing the kind old hand.  “Oh! these terrible times!”

“Yet there is still something to be thankful for.”

“Of course, for it will be even worse in hell,” replied the widow.

“Don’t fall into sin,” said the aged matron:  “You have only one sick person in the house.  Can I see Frau Maria?”

“She is in the workshops, taking the people a little meat from our store.  Are you too so short of flour?  Cows are still to be seen in the pastures, but the grain seems to have been actually swept away; there wasn’t a peck in the market.  Will you take a sip of wine too?  Shall I call my sister-in-law?”

“I will seek her myself.  The usury in the market is no longer to be endured.  We can do nothing more there, but she is already bringing people to reason.”

“The traders in the market?” asked Georg.

“Yes, Herr von Dornburg, yes.  One wouldn’t believe how much that delicate woman can accomplish.  Day before yesterday, when we went about to learn how large a stock of provisions every house contains, people treated me and the others very rudely, many even turned us out of doors.  But she went to the roughest, and the cellars and store-rooms opened before her, as the waves of the sea divided before the people of Israel.  How she does it, Heaven knows, but the people can’t refuse her.”

Georg drew a long breath and left the kitchen.  In the court-yard he found several city soldiers, volunteers and militia-men, with whom he went through exercises in fencing.  Van der Werff placed it at his disposal for this purpose, and there certainly was no man in Leyden more capable than the German of supplying worthy Allertssohn’s place.