his fields; but finally he was obliged to pass many long days of his life laid out on a bed of sickness, and he was so quiet that those who were not acquainted with him would have thought that he was deaf. And I had a mother, who, in all her ways and manners, was the opposite of my father, and she used to do things which were beyond her capacity; her words to every one were many, and she poured out her speech uselessly to every one, and she talked so much that every one imagined that her body was composed wholly of tongues. Moreover, she had quarrels with her neighbours continually, and she was always in a state of drunkenness, and she drank shamelessly at all times with wanton folk, and she managed the affairs of her house badly, after the manner of a harlot; and at length, though the house was well furnished with goods of every kind, it was with the greatest difficulty that the people could find enough to supply our wants. She was very lax in the care for the things which my father required in his illness, but she displayed the utmost attention in providing for her own body in a disgraceful manner, and the people of the village at length fled before her shameless appearance. No illness ever came upon her, and shehad never been ill in the whole course of her life, from the day she was born, and she was healthy in body until her death.
When therefore, I, a wretched girl, had lived for some time in such circumstances as these, it happened that, after struggling against a long illness, that is to say, my father was obliged to pass every day of his life in the infirmity of sickness, at length he departed from the world. Now at the very moment of his death the weather changed, and the rain poured down in torrents, and lightnings and thunders were tearing through the air, and disturbing it violently, and it was impossible to tell whether it was day or whether it was night; for this reason my father lay dead on his bier for three days, for the weather did not permit him to be buried. And, moreover, it made the people of the village to shake their heads, and they wondered, and said, “Perhaps great wickednesses were committed by this man secretly, and he may have been found to be such an enemy of God that even the earth will not permit his burial”; but, in order that his body might not go wholly to corruption, even though the weather was gloomy and threatening, and the rain had not ceased, by some means or other we carried him [to the grave], and laid him therein. Now my mother, as one who had found great relief, forthwith fulfilled unreproved her wanton lusts to the utmost, and she straightway turned my father’s house into an abode of harlots, and she lived there in such a state of luxury and lascivious pleasure that soon of all the goods in it only a mere remnant was left, and that
