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first thing my eye lit upon was the opening chapter of the Book of Job with a fine woodcut, beautifully coloured in, at the head. I asked the figures in it strange questions and when I received no answer I said, just as the hermit crept up behind me, ‘You little wretches, have you lost your tongues? Haven’t you just been chatting to my father (that was what I called the hermit) for long enough? I can see you’re driving off that poor Da’s sheep and have set fire to his house. Stop, stop! I’ll put out the fire’, and I stood up to go and fetch some water, for I thought it was needed.
    The hermit, whom I didn’t realise was behind me, said, ‘Where are you off to, Simplicius?’
    ‘Oh, father’, I replied, ‘there are soldiers who have taken some sheep and are going to drive them off. They’ve taken them away from that poor man you were talking to just now. His house is going up in flames as well and if I don’t put them out it will burn down to the ground’, pointing with my finger at what I could see as I spoke.
    ‘Stay where you are’, said the hermit, ‘there’s no danger.’
    ‘Are you blind?’ I answered in my rustic manner. ‘You stop them driving the sheep off and I’ll fetch the water.’
    ‘But’, said the hermit, ‘these pictures are not alive. They have been made to show us things that happened a long time ago.’
    ‘But how can they not be alive?’ I replied. ‘You were talking to them a moment ago.’
    The hermit was forced to laugh, contrary to his habit, and said, ‘My dear child, these pictures cannot speak, but I can tell what they are and what they’re doing from these black lines. This is called reading, and while I was doing it you supposed I was talking to the pictures, but that was not the case.’
    ‘If I’m a human like you’, I replied, ‘then I ought to be able to tell the same things as you can from the black lines. I don’t follow what you’re saying. Dear father, teach me how to understand this matter.’
    At that he said, ‘Very well, my son, I will teach you so that you will be able to talk to these pictures, only it will take time. It will take patience on my part and hard work on yours.’ Then he printed the alphabet for me on pieces of birch bark and when I knew the letters I learnt to spell, then to read and eventually to write, even more clearly than the hermit himself, since I printed everything.

Chapter 11
     

Concerns food, household goods and other necessary things we must have in this earthly life
     
    I spent about two years in that forest, that is up to the time the hermit died and something over half a year after that. Therefore it seems a good idea to tell the reader, who is often curious to know the least detail, about our way of life there.
    For food we had all kinds of garden produce, turnips, cabbages, beans, peas and suchlike, nor did we despise beech nuts or wild apples, pears and cherries. Often we were so hungry we were happy to eat acorns. Our bread – cake might be a better word – we baked in hot ashes from maize we ground up. In the winter we caught birds with snares and gins; in the spring and summer God sent us fledglings from the nests; often we made do with snails and frogs, and we were not averse to fishing with nets and rods since not far from where we lived was a stream full of fish and crayfish, all of which made our diet of coarse vegetables more palatable. Once we caught a young wild pig, which we kept in a pen, fed on acorns and beech mast, fattened up and finally ate, since the hermit said it could be no sin to enjoy things God had created for all the human race for that very purpose. We did not need much salt, and no spices at all, for we did not want to arouse our thirst seeing that we had no cellar. The little salt we needed was given to us by a pastor who lived about fifteen miles away and of whom I shall have much to say later on.
    As far as household goods were concerned, I can say that we had enough. We had