"Künze tarried then no longer, but came, as Engelmuot bade her. She was in a hurry; quickly she dressed. Both sides of her gown were red silk. The finest of girls! No one could discover through the country, one I should be so glad to give my dear mother for a daughter.
"Haha! How she pleased me, when I saw what she was; such hair, and red lips. Then I asked her to sit by me, but she said: 'I don't dare; I've been told not to talk with you, or even sit by you. Go and ask Heilke over there by Vriderune!'"
"I hear dancing in the room," he sings at another time; "a crowd of village women are there; two fiddles; when they pause, gay outbreak of talking and laughing. Through the window goes the hubbub. Adelber never dances but between two girls." Sometimes the knightly guest entered into the gay interlude of conversation, entertaining a merry screaming group. But when his moody vein, or vexation at some common man's successful rivalry, dulled his social spirits, he would stand apart, or go to one side with one of the peasant maids, and satirically note the men scattered over the room. The young farmer's assumption of the dress and manners of gentility, carrying arms, discarding rustic fashions, affecting polite speech ("_Mit sîner rede er vlaemet_," Neidhart says of one of them,--he talks like a fine gentleman from abroad),--all this was ridiculous to the courtly poet, and his sense of the humor of it was associated with the bitterness of social contempt. "Look at Engelmar, how high he holds his head. What elegant style he has, at the dance, with his showy sword; something different from his father Batze. His son is a poor gawk, with his rough head. He puffs himself out like a stuffed pigeon, that sits crop-full on a corn-chest." And again: "Did you ever see so gay a peasant as he is? Good Lord! he is first of all in the dance. His sword-band is two hands broad. Proud enough he, of his new jacket; it has four and twenty small pieces of cloth in it, and the sleeves come down over his hand."[8] "There are two peasants wearing coats in the court style, of Austrian cloth. Uoze never cut them."
"Perhaps you would like to hear how the rustics are dressed. Their clothes are above their place. Small coats they wear, and small cloaks; red hoods, shoes with buckles, and black hose. They have on silk pouch-bags, and in them they carry pieces of ginger, to make themselves agreeable to the girls. They wear their hair long, a privilege of good birth. They put on gloves that come up to their elbows. One appears in a fustian jacket green as grass. Another flaunts it in red. Another carries a sword long as a hemp flail, wherever he goes; the knob of its hilt has a mirror, that he makes the girls look at themselves in. Poor clumsy louts, how can the girls endure them? One of them tears his partner's veil, another sticks his sword hilt through her gown, as they are dancing, and more than once, enthusiastically dancing and excited by the music, their awkward feet tread on the girls' skirts and even drag them off. But they are more than clumsy, they have an offensive horse-play kind of pleasantry that is nothing less than insult. They put their hands in wrong places, and one of them tries to get a maiden's ring, and actually wrenches it from her finger as she is treading the bending _reie_.