Perhaps, too, it was
Walloon quickness and readiness of wit that had made them, so soon as
they became affiliated, so prominent in all the councils of the good
free city, and so noted for excellence in art and learning. Indeed
the present head of the family, Master Gottfried Sorel, was so much
esteemed for his learning that he had once had serious thoughts of
terming himself Magister Gothofredus Oxalicus, and might have carried
it out but for the very decided objections of his wife, Dame Johanna,
and his little niece, Christina, to being dubbed by any such surname.
Master Gottfried had had a scapegrace younger brother named Hugh, who
had scorned both books and tools, had been the plague of the
workshop, and, instead of coming back from his wandering year of
improvement, had joined a band of roving Lanzknechts. No more had
been heard of him for a dozen or fifteen years, when he suddenly
arrived at the paternal mansion at Ulm, half dead with intermittent
fever, and with a young, broken-hearted, and nearly expiring wife,
his spoil in his Italian campaigns.
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