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On the way he was taken by the plague, and with difficulty dragged himself in to Ravensburg. For three months he lay ill, and death came very close. As its unearthly glow irradiated the world around him, reversing its light and shade, the visions of the nunnery recurred. He vowed that if his life were still his to give, it should be given to God's service; and on recovering he entered Ottobeuren.
As he passed in that evening through the abbey-gate, there was thankfulness in his heart that he was back out of the world and its petty disappointments. On Low Sunday, 1506, he was ordained priest at Ottobeuren, and celebrated his first mass. Some of his letters are to friends inviting them to be present, and adjuring them to come empty-handed, without the customary gifts.
The peasants there destroyed everything belonging to the monks that they could find outside the walls, and threatened dire treatment when they should force their way in; but mercifully the walls were strong, and held out. Ottobeuren was less fortunate. Being in the country, it had to rely upon itself, and so fell an easy prey.
Binding books was one of his occupations; and in 1509, when a press was set up in the monastery, he lent a hand in the printing. He was very fortunate in his abbot, Leonard Widemann, who had been Steward when he entered Ottobeuren, but was elected Abbot in 1508, and outlived him by three years, dying in 1546. Widemann called upon him for service.
On his way back to Ottobeuren, Ellenbog arrived at a village, where he had counted on a night's rest, only to find it crowded with a wedding-party; the followers of the bridegroom, who were escorting him to the marriage on the morrow, a Sunday.
We are in a position to view from the inside another Benedictine house at this period, that of Ottobeuren, near Memmingen, which lies about mid-way between Augsburg and the east end of the Lake of Constance. It is not so continuous a narrative as Butzbach's, but the picture that it gives is rather more pleasing.
John was a frequent guest at Ottobeuren, and one of Nicholas' invitations contains what is unusual among the humanists, an appreciation of the charms of the country: 'Come, he says, 'and hear the songs of the birds, the shepherds' pipes and the children's horns, the choruses of reapers and ploughmen, and the voices of the girls as they work in the fields.
Ottobeuren lay on one of the routes to Italy, and so they had plenty of visitors bringing news from regions far off: a Carthusian, who had been in Ireland and seen St. Patrick's cave; a party of Hungarian acrobats with dancing bears; a young Cretan, John Bondius, who had seen the labyrinth of Minos, but all walled up to prevent men from straying into it and being lost.
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