Coming back to his workshop, the baes, seeing his leather in pieces:
"What have you done there, good-for-nothing botcher?" said he.
"What you bade me," Ulenspiegel made answer.
"I bade you," replied the baes, "cut me shoes in which might be put handily everything that leads oxen, swine, and sheep, and you make me shoes for the feet of the beasts."
"Baes, what leads the boar but the sow, the donkey but the ass, the bull but the heifer, the ram but the ewe, in the season when all the beasts are in love?"
Then he went away, and must needs remain outside.
At this time 'twas April, the air had been soft and sweet, then it froze hard and the sky was gray as on All Souls' Day. The third year of Ulenspiegel's banishment had long since run out and Nele awaited her friend from day to day. "Alas!" said she, "it will snow on the pear trees, on the flowering jasmine, on all the poor plants unfolded confidingly in the genial warmth of an untimely springtide. Already the little flakes are falling from the sky upon the roadways. And it snoweth, too, upon my poor heart.
"Where are the bright rays playing on bright faces, on the roofs they made still redder than their wont, on the window panes they caused to flame? Where are they, warming earth and sky, bird and insect? Alas! now night and day I am chilled to the bone with sadness and my long waiting. Where art thou, Ulenspiegel, my dear?"
Ulenspiegel, drawing near Renaix in Flanders, was hungry and thirsty, but he would by no means complain, and endeavoured to make folk laugh so they might give him bread. But he laughed not over well, and they passed him by and gave him nothing.
It was cold: turn and turn about it snowed, rained, and hailed on the back of the wanderer. If he passed through the villages, the water came in his mouth only to see a dog gnawing a bone in the angle of a wall. Fain and fain would he have earned a florin, but had no idea how the florin could fall into his pouch.
Looking up, he saw the pigeons that from the roof of the dove cote dropped white pieces on the highway, but they were not florins. He searched on the ground along the causeways, but florins do not bloom among the paving stones.
Looking to the right hand he saw a rascal cloud that moved onward into the sky, like a great watering pot, but he knew that if aught were to fall from this cloud it would not be a plump of florins. Looking to the left hand he saw a great idle horse-chestnut tree, living and doing nothing: "Ah!" he said to himself, "why are there no florin trees? They would be splendid trees, indeed!"