him.
Ezra flattened out the paper and read it. It wasn’t cash, but it the next best thing, a note from the local branch of Boot’s Bank saying that Juliane Lortz had the ability to pay Ursula Sprug up to three hundred dollars for glasses for her daughter Anna. He passed it over to Ursula. “I’ll get onto Anna’s new glasses as soon as I get back to Grantville. Ursula should have them inside a week.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“You’re supposed to be running a business, not a charity.”
“I know, but well…” Ursula sighed.
“Yes, I know. You can’t condemn a child to an out of focus world just for the sake of a few dollars. But you have to earn a living. Can you afford to subsidize Anna’s glasses?”
Ursula nodded. It would be hard, but not as hard as knowing that Anna would continue to live in her out of focus world.
“It’s good to see you’re not in the business just for the money, but just this once, I’ll carry the cost.”
“Thank you, Dr. Shipley.”
“Now, about that sign outside your shop…you’re not going to tell me you’re performing free examinations, are you?”
Ursula shuffled her feet and bowed her head to break eye contact. “I had to, Dr. Shipley. Hardly anybody came in for an eye examination when I was charging for them. Now I have half a dozen or more examinations every day, with most of them leading to orders for glasses.”
“You’re making up for the examinations on the glasses?” Dr. Shipley shook his head in disgust. “You’re putting the profession back decades, Ursula.”
“What? Back decades? I thought what I can do was supposed to be years ahead of the general standard of optometry.”
Dr. Shipley grinned. “Back up-time it took the profession decades to make the practice of hiding the cost of examinations in the price of glasses illegal.”
“Why make it illegal? Why would people pay for an examination if they didn’t know they needed an examination? Quite a few of my customers didn’t think they needed glasses, but they wanted to take advantage of something that was free.”
Dr. Shipley opened his mouth as if to reply, then slammed it shut. He glared down at Ursula and gently shook his head. “It’s not professional.”
A week later
Anna stared at Ursula from her position high on the examination chair. “The man hurt me. You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”
“No, Anna. I’m sorry the eye drops hurt, but Dr. Shipley had to use them so we could check your eyes. Now, I just want you to look at the eye chart.” Ursula covered Anna’s right eye and pointed to the man on the horse on the on the top line. “What am I pointing to?”
“Horsie.”
“Very good. Now let’s try going down a line.” She pointed to the hand.
Anna shook her head.
Ursula repeated the steps with the left eye covered with similar results.
“Right. Now I’m going to put on your new glasses and we’ll try again.” Ursula removed the spectacles from their case, checked them for dust and finger prints, and then gently placed them on Anna’s face. She had to make a slight adjustment to the nose piece to position them properly, but soon she was happy.
She pointed to the hand on the second line. “What is this shape?”
“It’s a hand, and below it is a duck, and a fish, and a hand, and a man on a horsie.”
“Very good, Anna. What about this?” Ursula pointed to the cat on the fourth line.
“A cat.”
“ Very good.” Ursula took Anna down the chart as far as she could go and then checked the other eye. It looked like Anna was now seeing at 20/30, just like Dr. Shipley had said she would. “That’s very good. Now, I want you to take very good care of your glasses. I’ll give your mother instructions on how to care for them.” She walked over to Juliane, leaving Anna to look around the room.
“Look at all the birdies.”
Juliane turned to see where Anna was pointing. There were sparrows pecking at something on the ground nearly thirty feet away. Anna had never noticed anything smaller than a horse that far away before.
“There are people riding on that wagon, Mommy.”
Juliane felt a lump in her throat. Anna was looking around and pointing at things as if she was seeing them for the first time. She looked around the street and tried to imagine what it must have looked like to Anna before she got her new glasses. And to think she and her husband had almost decided they couldn’t afford glasses for Anna.
She crouched down and hugged Anna. “Yes, darling. There are people in the wagon. What else can you see?”
Anna’s tiny hand reached out and brushed the eyebrows above Juliane’s eyes. “What are these?”
“They’re eyebrows. Feel above your eyes; you have them as well.”
Anna brushed a hand against her own eyebrows. “I do too.”
Juliane rose to her feet. The change in Anna already was astonishing. It was reward enough for the economies they would have to exercise to pay off the debt to the bank. Surely Joachim would be pleased for Anna.
Anna let her mother take her hand again. She didn’t really notice where they were going; she was too busy examining the new world that her glasses had opened for her.
They walked up to their home. Anna was able to recognize some things, but there was so much that she had missed in the past.
There was a man standing at the door. Anna walked up to her father, studying every detail. “Your eyebrows are bigger than Mommy’s.”
Make Mine Macrame
Prologue
Magdeburg, November 1634
“Bernhard is,” Mike Stearns said, “ your brother. You might want to keep your tendency to view with alarm within pretty strict limits on this one, even if it did happen on my watch.”
Wilhelm Wettin looked at him sourly.
“We were preoccupied with the League of Ostend. I admit it,” Mike offered.
“Southern Alsace,” Wettin said. “Not only the Franche Comte, which is the problem of the Isabella Clara Eugenia and the king in the Netherlands rather than the USE, but all of southern Alsace, except for Strassburg itself.”
“Not all,” Francisco Nasi interjected. “Strassburg is a USE city-state and has managed to annex a considerable rural hinterland in the midst of all the confusion. Not to mention that it was Bernhard’s pulling his cavalry back to the line south of Strassburg last spring that permitted Nils Brahe to annex the Province of the Upper Rhine for the USE.”
