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But the picture of a young student's sufferings under an elder's cruelty can be paralleled with surprising closeness from the autobiography of Thomas Platter, mentioned above; the wandering from one school to another, the maltreatment, the begging, the enforced stealing, all these are reproduced with just the difference of surroundings. Platter's account of his life at Breslau is worth quoting.
It came out of dark alleyways on tawny camels loaded with pots; on pattering asses half buried under nets of cut clover; in the exquisitely modelled hands of little children scurrying home from the cookshop with the evening meal, chin pressed against the platter's edge and eyes round with responsibility above the pile; in the broken lights from jutting rooms overhead, where the women lie, chin between palms, looking out of windows not a foot from the floor; in every glimpse into every courtyard, where the men smoke by the tank; in the heaps of rubbish and rotten bricks that flanked newly painted houses, waiting to be built, some day, into houses once more; in the slap and slide or the heelless red-and-yellow slippers all around, and, above all, in the mixed delicious smells of frying butter, Mohammedan bread, kababs, leather, cooking-smoke, assafetida, peppers, and turmeric.
'Coons'd be all right but they're liable f'r to hand ye ye'er food in ragtime, an' if ye ordher pork-chops f'r dinner an' th' hall is long,'tis little ye'll have to eat whin th' platter's set down, I says. 'No, says I, 'they'se no naytionality now livin' in this counthry that're nathral bor-rn servants, I says. 'If ye want to save throuble, I says, 'ye'll import ye'er help.
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