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Middendorff left his family, and replaced me at Willisau, living there for four years far away from wife and child. At Keilhau I found things had improved, and the numbers had increased most cheeringly. I determined to throw all my strength into the work of raising the mother institution from her slough of debt.
Soon both the Duke, Leopold II, and the Confederates were fully prepared, and the former took the field with a large army. After menacing Zurich, the Duke, accompanied by many nobles from Germany, France, and North Italy, headed some six thousand picked men, and marched upon Lucerne. On his way he burned Willisau and several smaller towns, where his troops committed every form of excess.
Ferdinand Froebel and Middendorff remained in Willisau. Froebel and his wife went to Burgdorf, to found and direct the proposed Orphanage. In his capacity as Director, Froebel had to give what was called a Repetitive Course to the teachers. In that Canton, namely, there was an excellent regulation which gave three months' leave to the teachers once in every two years.
They gave themselves out as business people from Willisau, and soon informed us that they had formed the notion of trying to get some assistance for us, and our enterprise for their native town. This they actually did. We received an invitation from twenty associated well-to-do families in Willisau to remove our school there, and more fully to work out our plans amongst them.
As "God be with us" seized the villains by the throat, a few drops of blood trickled from Jesus' wounds. To prevent others, therefore, from falling in a like way into the power of the arch-deceiver, a yearly commemorative festival is held at Willisau.
The institution at Willisau gained unlimited confidence there; but the malevolent opposition of the clerical party secretly flourished as before, and succeeded in depriving it of all aid from more distant places. Under these circumstances we could not attain that prosperity which so much activity and self-sacrificing work on the part of our circle must otherwise infallibly have brought.
The Willisau Institution, although outwardly flourishing, was limited more and more narrowly by the bigotry of the priests, and must evidently now be soon given up, since the Government had passed into the hands of the Jesuit party. Langethal and Ferdinand Froebel were nominated Directors of Burgdorf. Middendorff rejoined his family at Keilhau.
In Willisau a church festival is held once a year, in which a communion-wafer is shown, miraculously spotted with blood. The drops of blood were believed by the people to have been evoked from the figure of Jesus by the crime of two gamblers; who, having cursed Jesus, flung their sword at him, whereupon the devil appeared.
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