Vine-hills, among the hottest sun-bibbers of the Rheingau, glistened in
the roll of Gottlieb's possessions; corn-acres below Cologne; basalt-
quarries about Linz; mineral-springs in Nassau, a legacy of the Romans to
the genius and enterprise of the first of German traders. He could have
bought up every hawking crag, owner and all, from Hatto's Tower to
Rheineck. Lore-ley, combing her yellow locks against the night-cloud,
beheld old Gottlieb's rafts endlessly stealing on the moonlight through
the iron pass she peoples above St. Goar. A wailful host were the wives
of his raftsmen widowed there by her watery music!
This worthy citizen of Cologne held vasty manuscript letters of the
Kaiser addressed to him:
'Dear Well-born son and Subject of mine, Gottlieb!' and he was easy with
the proudest princes of the Holy German Realm. For Gottlieb was a money-
lender and an honest man in one body. He laid out for the plenteous
harvests of usury, not pressing the seasons with too much rigour. 'I sow
my seed in winter,' said he, 'and hope to reap good profit in autumn; but
if the crop be scanty, better let it lie and fatten the soil.'
'Old earth's the wisest creditor,' he would add; 'she never squeezes the
sun, but just takes what he can give her year by year, and so makes sure
of good annual interest.'
Therefore when people asked Gottlieb how he had risen to such a pinnacle
of fortune, the old merchant screwed his eye into its wisest corner, and
answered slyly, 'Because I 've always been a student of the heavenly
bodies'; a communication which failed not to make the orbs and systems
objects of ardent popular worship in Cologne, where the science was long
since considered alchymic, and still may be.
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