Margery | Page 3

cover and had finally fallen into the hands of the curiosity
dealer of whom I bought them. And after surviving travels on land, risk
of fire, the ravages of worms and the ruthlessness of man for four
centuries, they finally fell a prey to the destructive fury of the waves;
but my memory served me well as to the contents, and at my bidding
was at once ready to aid me in restoring the narrative I had read. The
copied portions were a valuable aid, and imagination was able to fill
the gaps; and though it failed, no doubt, to reproduce Margery
Schopper's memoirs phrase for phrase and word for word, I have on the
whole succeeded in transcribing with considerable exactitude all that
she herself had thought worthy to be rescued from oblivion. Moreover I
have avoided the repetition of the mode of talk in the fifteenth century,
when German was barely commencing to be used as a written language,
since scholars, writers, and men of letters always chose the Latin
tongue for any great or elegant intellectual work. The narrator's
expressions would only be intelligible to a select few, and, I should
have done my Margery injustice, had I left the ideas and descriptions,
whose meaning I thoroughly understood, in the clumsy form she had
given them. The language of her day is a mirror whose uneven surface
might easily reflect the fairest picture in blurred or distorted out lines to
modern eyes. Much, indeed which most attracted me in her descriptions
will have lost its peculiar charm in mine; as to whether I have always
supplemented her correctly, that must remain an open question.
I have endeavored to throw myself into the mind and spirit of my
Margery and repeat her tale with occasional amplification, in a familiar
style, yet with such a choice of words as seems suitable to the date of
her narrative. Thus I have perpetuated all that she strove to record for

her descendants out of her warm heart and eager brain; though often in
mere outline and broken sentences, still, in the language of her time and
of her native province.

MARGERY
CHAPTER I.
I, MARGERY SCHOPPER, was born in the year of our Lord 1404, on
the Tuesday after Palm Sunday. My uncle Christan Pfinzing of the
Burg, a widower whose wife had been a Schopper, held me at the font.
My father, God have his soul, was Franz Schopper, known as Franz the
Singer. He died in the night of the Monday after Laetare Sunday in
1404, and his wife my mother, God rest her, whose name was Christine,
was born a Behaim; she had brought him my two brothers Herdegen
and Kunz, and she died on the eve of Saint Catharine's day 1404; so
that I lost my mother while I was but a babe, and God dealt hardly with
me also in taking my father to Himself in His mercy, before I ever saw
the light.
Instead of a loving father, such as other children have, I had only a
grave in the churchyard, and the good report of him given by such as
had known him; and by their account he must have been a right merry
and lovable soul, and a good man of business both in his own affairs
and in those pertaining to the city. He was called "the Singer" because,
even when he was a member of the town-council, he could sing sweetly
and worthily to the lute. This art he learned in Lombardy, where he had
been living at Padua to study the law there; and they say that among
those outlandish folk his music brought him a rich reward in the love of
the Italian ladies and damsels. He was a well-favored man, of goodly
stature and pleasing to look upon, as my brother Herdegen his oldest
son bears witness, since it is commonly said that he is the living image
of his blessed father; and I, who am now an old woman, may freely
confess that I have seldom seen a man whose blue eyes shone more
brightly beneath his brow, or whose golden hair curled thicker over his
neck and shoulders than my brother's in the high day of his happy

youth.
He was born at Eastertide, and the Almighty blessed him with a happy
temper such as he bestows only on a Sunday-child. He, too, was skilled
in the art of singing, and as my other brother, my playmate Kunz, had
also a liking for music and song, there was ever a piping and playing in
our orphaned and motherless house, as if it were a nest of mirthful
grasshoppers, and more childlike gladness and happy merriment
reigned there than in many another house that rejoices in the presence