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The Forest Farm: Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

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Title: The Forest Farm: Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

Author: Peter Rosegger

Contributor: Maude Egerton King
        Julius Petersen


        
Release date: December 4, 2014 [eBook #47533]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FOREST FARM: TALES OF THE AUSTRIAN TYROL ***

The Forest Farm




[Illustration: _Frontispiece._] THE FOREST FARM. [_Drawn by Milicent
Norris._]




  The Forest Farm

  _Tales of the Austrian Tyrol_

  By
  Peter Rosegger

  With an Appreciation by Maude Egerton King
  And a Biographical Note by Dr. Julius Petersen

  The Vineyard Press
  London: A. C. Fifield, 13 Clifford's Inn, E.C.
  1912




WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH




  Contents


                                                             PAGE

         FRONTISPIECE: THE FOREST FARM. Drawn by MELICENT
           NORRIS

         ROSEGGER: AN APPRECIATION. By MAUDE EGERTON KING       9

         PETER ROSEGGER: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. By DR. JULIUS
           PETERSEN. With a portrait                           15

      I. MY FATHER AND I. Illustrated by M. E. K. and L. E.    29

     II. HOW I GAVE GOD MY SUNDAY JACKET. Translated by A. T.
           DE MATTOS                                           36

    III. CHRISTMAS EVE. Translated by M. E. K.                 42

     IV. A LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT. Translated by M. E. K.     61

      V. HOW LITTLE MAXEL'S HOUSE WAS BURNED DOWN. Translated
           by M. E. K. and L. G.                               74

     VI. THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FOUR NIGHTS AND A NIGHT.
           Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS                       80

    VII. HOW THE WHITE KID DIED. Translated by A. T. DE
           MATTOS                                              86

   VIII. CHILDREN OF THE WORLD IN THE FOREST. Translated by
           A. T. DE MATTOS                                     93

     IX. HOW MEISENSEPP DIED. Translated by LOUISE EVERS      105

      X. THE CORPUS CHRISTI ALTAR. Translated by A. T. DE
           MATTOS                                             114

     XI. ABOUT KICKEL, WHO WENT TO PRISON. Translated by
           ETHEL BLOUNT                                       124

    XII. HOW I CAME TO THE PLOUGH. Translated by A. T. DE
           MATTOS                                             142

   XIII. THE RECRUIT. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS           146

    XIV. A FORGOTTEN LAND. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS      161

     XV. THE SCHOOLMASTER. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS      170

    XVI. THE STAG ON THE WALL. Translated by MELICENT NORRIS
           and M. E. KING                                     179

   XVII. FOREST-LILY IN THE SNOW. Translated by A. T. DE
           MATTOS                                             186

  XVIII. THE SACRED CORNFIELD. Translated by M. E. KING and
           L. SWIETOKOWSKI                                    190

    XIX. ABOUT MY MOTHER. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS       195




Rosegger: An Appreciation


The unmistakable trend of our time is the civilisation--which, in its
modern form, is largely urbanisation--of the whole habitable globe.
From its centres outwards it is thrusting itself upon places, men,
processes--ultimate sanctuaries, never before reached by alien
trespassing. Most men are looking on at its destruction of the old
order with shrugging acceptance of the inevitable, or hailing the
chaotic stuff of the new in its making with so far unjustified joy.
With a wit worn somewhat threadbare with use they invariably counsel
the few eccentrics who deny its inevitability and question its
beneficence to quit the hopes and mops of Mrs. Partington for the
discreet submission of the wiser Canute. Then they grow properly grave,
and declare that this modern civilisation, for all its shortcomings,
has been well described as a banquet, the like of which, for those
below as for those above the salt, has never been spread before.
However that may be, there is no question that here and there a guest
is sometimes moved to look round on the company and scan its several
types with a sudden sense of their significance. Some of these, good
and bad, are common to all late civilisations, he perceives, others as
hatefully peculiar to our own as certain diseases. Where, in God's
name, were there ever till now men like these, who bend a complaisant
spectacled gaze on a world going under, content if they may but first
secure their museum sample (including one carefully chosen, perfectly
embalmed, stuffed and catalogued peasant) of every species? Or their
younger kindred--men whose intellect obeys no inspiration save
curiosity nor law save its own limit, whose inventions, therefore,
cannot foster good and beauty but only spoil these in Nature and men's
souls? As for that splendid group beyond, one may question if Athens,
Rome, or Byzantium, whose sumptuous culture of brain and body achieved
an almost criminal comeliness by Christian standards, ever equalled
them: question, too, whether their selfish perfection or the travesty
of it in this mob of women dull with luxury, of men brutalised by the
scramble of getting it for them--be less desirable for the race!
Thankfully his eye passes from them to those who turn such a cold
shoulder upon their vulgarity: a little company, fine-edged, polished
and flexible with perpetual fence of wit and word, hardly peculiar to
our day perhaps, but rather such as might have played their
irresponsible game on the eve of any red revolution. Now and again they
lend an amused ear to various gassy gospels over the way, where, as he
perceives, he is once more among the children of this latter day alone:
notably certain insignificances who, because they have raised their
self-indulgence to the dignity of a problem play, are solemnly
mistaking themselves (as actors and audience too) for pioneers of
social progress; and some earnest women who have slammed the front door
on their nearest and dearest stay-at-home duties and privileges, to go
questing after problematical rights. It looks, too, as if the same
types, modified for worse and better by class conditions, were repeated
below the salt; but there the multitude is so great that the
individuals are soon lost in a far-off colourless mass--sometimes a
menacing mass--by no means so content with stale bread as the others
with caviare.

Is then this civilisation to become the universal order? he asks
himself; and must the world it has laid waste be repeopled from these?
The very fear of it summons a shadowy memory of fathers' fathers among
Sussex sheepfolds, Highland crofts, Tuscan vineyards, or German
forests. After that the banquet grits in the teeth like husks, and
there is nothing possible but to get up and go out from it, sick with
longing for those simpler, saner people. To them, it is said,
fatherhood, motherhood, home, were chiefest of prides and sanctities
outside Heaven. They either kept or consciously broke the ten
commandments, but they never set up the _Seven deadly Sins_ in their
place. They won life out of the earth, sometimes with difficulty
enough, but the struggle bred a muscle and fortitude only now failing
their descendants in hyper-civilisation. They laboured, and took their
pleasures too, under open skies and in quiet places where the divine
voice could clearly be heard at times, and unperplexedly obeyed.

Between fear and hope these famished feasters come at last to the
ancestral places; only too often to find them ruined, or sheltering
some sad survival unaware of his own splendid history. On the cold
thresholds they stand, stricken with the sense of the world's
irreparable loss in a virile and faithful race.

Just so far have many thinking people come to-day, and there remain,
needing a leader who can turn regretful retrospect to rational hope.
Such a one is Peter Rosegger, whose life is a type of our own day and a
prophecy of better. He, too, left the land for the city, and now,
because all his culture and experience do but confirm his faith that
_Bauernthum_ is as necessary for the world's soul as the bread which
the peasant grows for its body, he has gone back to it. When he wants
new vigour for daily life, or for his mission of protecting and
pleading for a vanishing folk, he touches earth and gets it.
Peasant-born, in most of his books he _is_ Peasantry grown conscious
and articulate,--he gives us that life from within. But culture has
enabled him to see the peasant in his true relation to the world as
well, to measure the life he was born into with the civilisation whose
guest he has been. And so in one invaluable book, _Erdsegen_, he writes
of the folk life from without, and that with great truth and
consistency. The story is given in a series of letters from a city
journalist, who for a frivolous wager goes to live "the simple life" as
a peasant among peasants for one year. Looking through the townsman's
eyes, we find there no stage-peasant's Arcady, no rose-bowered cottages
pleasantly ready for week-end lodgers; rather we stare aghast at the
coarse food, rough work, some very unwholesome conditions, and
obstinate superstitions. The journalist's earlier letters treat of
these things with humorous realism, and we respect his pluck for
putting up with them. Gradually the tone of the letters changes, and we
see the innate fineness--not the cultured refinement--of the townsman,
responding to the strong faith behind the superstition, to the beauty
of the traditional labours, the heroic endurance of their undoing by
storm and bad fortune, and the acceptance of good and ill alike as from
the hands of a good if sometimes incomprehensible Father. The faint
sneer, even the amused smile, die from the townsman's face; dirt and
discomfort are lost sight of in the divine realities which draw him,
humbly enough at last, to throw in his lot with these humble people.

Rosegger is a true prophet, he never disguises truth in defending it.
His passion for essential Peasantry is too great for sentimentalities,
too honest for whitewash; and so while he exhilarates us with its
elemental force he does not fear to show where this merges into
brutality, nor when its simplicity opens the door to superstition. And
yet in the end we are one with his faith in _Bauernthum_ and the
world's need of it. The land-folk who emigrate to cities, and their
children there born, are fast losing and will soon quite lose what no
money or experience can compensate them for. Age after age, great
shaping influences from the forest, the mountain and the waters of the
mountain, the solitudes, the mastery and love of beasts, the
disciplinary tragedies and triumphs of agriculture, came and wrought
upon the humanity in their midst, gradually creating the customs,
traditions, lore and art--everything except religion in its _Church_
sense--which is part of the collective soul of Peasantry. Whatever
these uprooted land-folk gain in the city, though they gain the whole
world, they certainly lose their own soul--the soul special to
Peasantry and until now the fullest spring of the world's imaginative
life.

At times, perhaps when he has stayed too long in Graz, Rosegger writes
of _Bauernthum_ as of something irrevocably passing; at others he
utters his faith--for it is deeper than hope--that it will come again.
To him his own life is racially prophetic. He has had the best of
civilisation, intellectual intercourse, fame, travel, wealth: but from
these and all others of its benefits or lures, he has again and again
run back, mastered by a _Heimweh_ which saved him. Sometimes, in
terrible trouble, once at the point of death, he went back, and every
time the touch of the earth renewed him, body and soul. Signs of this
saving _Heimweh_ he sees here and there among those who remain at the
banquet, actually starving in satiety, some of them; and from the quiet
valley where his genius, long since the consecrated champion of the
ancient peasantry, does its best work, he calls upon these to come back
and make possible a new. His loyal traditionalism does not hinder his
belief that a new peasantry, not born, but becoming such from a choice
inspired by heart's hunger and a surfeit of civilisation, must have a
strong redemptive value of its own among the decadent nations.

Of the earth he writes as he wrote of the stern tender woman who bore
him in the Forest Farm,--with a worship that makes a town-bred creature
drag at his chain or break his heart to run home to her. She has never
failed him, he says, in any need of spirit or flesh, nor will she ever
fail her prodigals. When they come back in a hundred or a thousand
years they will find her patiently waiting to teach them all the vital
forgotten things over again: and, even if she take the gewgaws and
lumber out of their hands, she will leave them whatever of learning she
can with her ancient processes and gift of wonder transmute into
wisdom.

  M. E. K.


[Illustration: PETER ROSEGGER

(_By kind permission of Messrs. Staackmann, Leipsic_)

_To face page 15 "The Forest Farm."_]




Peter Rosegger

A Biographical Note

By Dr. Julius Petersen


I

In the heart of Austria lies Steiermark (Styria), a rough mountain
country on the eastern slope of the Alps. Its inhabitants, protected
from the levelling influences of modern civilisation and cut off from
that mingling with other peoples which destroys racial character, have
retained their old individuality and customs longer than any other
German people. Rough though the climate is, the soil stony, the
struggle for existence hard, these sons of the mountains have grown
stubbornly inseparable from their home; it is with difficulty that they
take root in other soil--they are evermore drawn back to the place
where once their cradle stood. In former centuries the Swiss soldiers
in French service could not hear the home-like chime of cow-bells
without a temptation to desert their colours; and time after time sons
of Steiermark have been driven back to their free hills by the
constraint of garrison life. The deserters were always easily caught:
the sergeant in pursuit had simply to look for the culprit in his
father's house. The _Heimweh_ (other languages can hardly express the
meaning of this word) is the national sickness to which all natives of
the Alps driven into foreign parts are subject, and it is but the other
side of that impassioned joy in the home, which finds expression in
jubilant songs and shouts rising for ever from the mountains to the
sky.

Peter Rosegger is the national poet of Styria. If it can be said that
all men on their way through life carry with them a clod of home-soil,
as the pious pilgrim carries a handful of sacred earth, then one may
say that this poet is home personified. "Styria on two legs," he is
called by his own people. All that can move the soul of this people,
from the lightest jest to the deepest longings and searchings, has
found expression in his writings.

He has passed through many phases of life, from peasant to craftsman,
to schoolmaster, to theologian, and all these phases are reflected in
his life-work. The son of the peasant, who on his journey has attained
the heights of humanity, is always turning back to his starting-point.
Like the old giant Antæus, he draws new strength from his mother Earth.
Close touch with the home soil is for him a condition of life. When
Rosegger was on a lecturing tour through the great German cities, where
he was enthusiastically greeted by audiences of thousands, there never
left him the longing for the silent peace of the mountains; and
_Heimweh_ drove him away even from the shining Gulf of Naples. Even
Graz, the beautiful capital of Steiermark, where Rosegger has his
vine-covered house, cannot take the place of home for him. In the
summer months he escapes to Krieglach in the Mürztal; there he lives
among his native people, and from his window he looks out to those
heights where, out of sight, stands a deserted farm--his birthplace.

In Alpl, near Krieglach, a forest community which has now almost ceased
to exist and even at the time of his birth consisted only of
twenty-three farms, Rosegger came into the world on July 31st, 1843. It
was almost by accident that he learnt to read and to write. An old
schoolmaster, whom the Church had dismissed from his office because of
his leanings towards freedom in 1848, wandered a beggar through the
mountains, and when he came to the peasants of Alpl they said: "Beggars
we have anyhow in plenty, but a schoolmaster we have not and never
have had since the world began. He shall be schoolmaster here, and our
children shall learn to read and to write; if it does no good, it can
do no harm." And so the old schoolmaster went hawking his learning from
house to house, and his school fees consisted of the right to eat as
much as ever he liked.

Peter, the son of the _Wald-bauer_ (forest peasant),[1] was soon known
for his learning. Once in the dead of winter he was taken to one of the
highest-lying farms, where the old peasant owner wanted to make her
will. There being neither paper nor ink, he wrote the will with
charcoal inside a coffer lid, for the boy was gifted with a bright
mother-wit which never left him at a loss. He read everything printed
that he could lay hands on, but as he did not find enough to read, he
began to write himself; stories of saints, sermons, works of devotion
and calendars. These he illustrated with drawings of his own invention.
A student who had spent his holidays in the mountains had left him a
little box of watercolours. The boy cut a lock of hair from his own
head, bound it to a little stick, and so made himself a brush with
which to paint his pictures of his saints. This story is a symbol of
all Rosegger's achievement of learning. However much outside help he
may have received, he may thank himself for the best, after all. "My
little saddle-horse," says he, "has never fed upon the dry hay of
school-knowledge, but only on the green grass of life itself. The
little that I know, Life has taught me, and the little that I can do,
Necessity. The inability to express myself by word of mouth has taught
me to write, and my desire to share that written word with others
taught me to read. As the father of a family, with a very uncertain
income, I learnt arithmetic; as a herdsman on the pasture land,
zoology; as farmer and stonecutter, mineralogy; as hay-maker and
woodcutter, botany. Geography I learnt in travelling; history from
events which followed one another as cause and consequence; folklore I
learnt as a travelling journeyman; and astronomy in sleepless nights,
when I lay and looked up at the stars. Thoughts about physiology,
anatomy, medicine, and patience have come to me in illness; theology I
have turned to in times of need and loneliness; and law has been learnt
in self-examination. Music became dear to me from the birds of the
woods and the sound of waterfalls. The telling of stories I never
learnt at all. My first baby stammer--so says our old cousin--was a
story in Styrian dialect; and my life, according to the belletristic
newspapers, was a romance."

His life, indeed, is rich in wonders, and the evolution of the peasant
boy a sort of fairy tale. Rosegger has described for us his youth in
the form of a novel, _Heidepeters Gabriel_ (1872), in which it all
reads like an impossible romance. Later he has published the story of
his life in a series of autobiographical writings, _Waldheimat_ (_The
Forest Home_, 1875); _Als Ich jung noch war_ (_When I was still young_,
1895); _Mein Weltleben_ (_My Life in the World_, 1898); in these the
same course of events is given with a wonderful truth to life. As
documents of a rare human evolution they may stand on a level with
Rousseau's _Confessions_; they are more lovable, though no less honest.

The boy very early saw something of the world. As a little fellow his
father took him with him on a pilgrimage to Maria Zell; his godfather,
on another pilgrimage, pointed out to him the first railway as an
uncanny bit of devil's invention; and on one occasion the
eleven-year-old boy set out alone for Vienna, reaching the Imperial
city after a several days' tramp. His aim was to visit the Kaiser Josef
II, of whose friendliness so many stories were going about among his
people. As a matter of fact, Josef II had been lying in his grave for
more than sixty years, and his visitor was conducted to his mausoleum.
Later, as he was again wandering in the streets and casting about how
to get home (for of his travelling money--the proceeds of the sale of a
lamb--only just the equivalent of the little beast's tail was left), a
bearded man came up to him and offered him five florins if he would
pose for half an hour in his studio. And, wonder on wonder, the
water-colour which the artist painted from this sketch now hangs in the
Rosegger Room at Mürzzuschlag, which is the nucleus of a future
Rosegger Museum! Here also is preserved the tailor's goose, which later
the boy, then in his apprenticeship, had to carry after his master; and
beside it is a peasant's waistcoat--the same apprentice's claim to
journeymanship! It appears that, though his brothers and sisters all
became farm-workers, the Waldbauer's first-born proved to be too sickly
for the ancestral calling. He was to become a priest. The parish priest
of Birkfeld offered to instruct him in Latin. Peter, as a candidate for
holy orders, was entrusted to the care of a peasant in that parish.
After three days he ran away in the night--home-sickness was too much
for him. So in 1860 he became apprentice to a master-tailor of his own
district, and played his part in his itinerant trade. He worked on more
than sixty farms in the neighbourhood, and in this way learned to know
the life of the people in Styria more intimately than would have been
possible in any other calling. The inexhaustible wealth of strange
character and peasant originality and the unique acquaintance with the
most ancient and characteristic native customs which Rosegger displays
in his later writings, are the fruit of those years of close
observation.

With the passion for reading grew the desire to write. One day his
master set out, leaving his carefully guarded paper-patterns lying
about. He was accustomed to apprentices, anxious to become independent,
making use of such an opportunity to copy the patterns for themselves.
His apprentice Peter seized on them too, concerning himself with their
shape not at all, but only with the contents of the cut-out newspapers
whose stale news he devoured. This made his master almost despair of
him. "Honesty's a very fine thing, Peter," he said, "but I can clearly
see you'll never be much of a credit to me. Here you are, waiting from
week to week for the end of your time, and have never yet stolen one
pattern from your master!"

Others, too, prophesied to the youth that he would never make a proper
tailor. Once he had to share quarters with a shoemaker's apprentice.
Then it was that the little note-book in which he used to write songs
of his own making was discovered. The song which made Rosegger
celebrated, and which as a genuine folk-song is not only sung in
Styria, but all over Germany, was amongst them: "Darf ih's Dirndl
liabe." The beauty of this song, which is inseparable from its dialect,
can scarcely be rendered in a translation: without the charming form
the idea is almost too primitive. The boy goes in succession to priest,
father, and mother, and puts the question to them, whether he may love
the maid? Each puts him sharply off until at last he goes to the Lord
God Himself, and there finds sympathy with his inquiry.

  "Why yes, of course," He smiled and said;
  "Because of the boy I have made the maid."

The shoemaker's apprentice found this moral most enlightening and
determined to send the song to his sweetheart, but could not believe
that the young tailor could make such verses without having a
sweetheart of his own. "Get along--and look here, you tell me of anyone
else who can turn out verses like that!" he said admiringly. "And don't
be angry, tailor; I don't understand much of your trade, but after
looking at your father's new jacket I don't mind telling you that
you'll never make a first-rate tailor. Your song now, _that's_ a
masterpiece if you like. Now, don't you forget, that down here on the
plain and in the farmer's oat-straw I told you how it would be--you'll
never remain a tailor. You'll go to the towns and become somebody;
you'll be a bookbinder! Mark my word, in the end you'll become a
bookbinder!"

That was the highest the shoemaker's apprentice could conceive of. But
it soon happened otherwise. Passing tourists had come across the verses
which the country folk had already set to music, and they encouraged
the author to send certain of them to town. As a result, the editor of
the Graz _Daily Post_ took an interest in the people's poet, and asked
him to send him all the poetry he had written and to give him an
account of his life. Peter packed up, and, carrying a bundle of
manuscripts weighing fifteen pounds, set off on his way to Graz. The
postage for such a parcel would have been quite beyond his means.


II

At the end of 1864 an article appeared in the Graz _Daily Post_,
entitled _A Styrian Poet of the People_, in which a larger
public was called upon to assist the young talented writer. And
now from all quarters sendings poured into the post office in
Krieglach--congratulations, books, small sums of money, and provisions.
A bookseller in Leibach offered him an apprenticeship. Rosegger
accepted it, but after a few days _Heimweh_ again drove him from the
unfamiliar district. However, a free scholarship was found for him at
the Graz Commercial Academy; friends and teachers were not wanting, and
here, between the years 1865-9 the farmer's son, not yet able, when he
entered it, to write correctly, received an intellectual training which
left him no longer inferior to the well educated. In the same year that
he left this institution his first book, a volume of poems in dialect,
and entitled _Zither und Hackbrett_ (_Zither and Dulcimer_), was
published. A second collection, _Tannenharz und Fichtennadeln_
(_Pine-resin and Fir-needles_), came out in the following year; and in
1870 also appeared his first picture of Styrian peasant life,
_Sittenbilder aus dem Steierischen Oberlande_. These won him some fame;
already publishers began to approach him with offers. And now once more
miracle entered his life. In the summer of 1872 a young and beautiful
Graz lady, accompanied by a friend, made a pilgrimage to the birthplace
of her favourite poet; there by chance she and her poet met, and a year
later they were married. Their happy life together lasted but a short
time; after the birth of a second child the young wife died. Six years
after his sad loss Rosegger made a second and equally happy marriage.

About his life since then there is not much to tell. One fact, however,
should be emphasised; namely, that Rosegger, who in his early years had
become indebted to so many friends, very soon began to pay them back,
and the account has long since been balanced in his favour and now
shows a debit on the other side. Many a time has he introduced the work
of young writers to the literary world with warm words of
recommendation, just as the distinguished poet Robert Hammerling once
did for his first collection of poems. The greater part of the profits
of his extensive lecture tour have been used for the public good.
Through him, a Catholic, Mürzzuschlag has got a Protestant church; his
home-parish, Alpl, has for some years now had a school-house of its own
for which it has to thank Rosegger. And only a short time ago it was
his eloquent intervention that obtained a large contribution for the
German School-Society--a society which aims at preserving
race-characteristics and culture where they are threatened on the
language frontiers. Were I to give data of his public life during the
last ten years, they would consist of such services as these, and of
the grateful homage which is rendered him by the many who love and
honour him. But his inner development is revealed in the writings of
his maturity; for Rosegger has written nothing but what in his inmost
heart he has experienced. Since 1876 he has edited a monthly magazine,
_Heimgarten_, which is his public diary. "Heimgarten," he tells us, "is
the name given in various districts to that house in the Alpine village
in which of an evening the village folk come together, bringing in
small handwork to do and enjoying one another's company. Here are to be
found the brightest of the inhabitants, those readiest in storytelling
and description, those who are men of the world, or who would like to
be such, assembled for educative and stimulating intercourse. In the
Heimgarten, stories and legends, tragic and comic incidents from life
are repeated; songs and ballads are sung; poems are improvised; farces
and comedies are given, or incidents of the day and important events in
the life of the village or the wide world are discussed by the village
wiseacres. Intercourse in the Heimgarten enlightens and enriches the
mind, quickens, warms, and ennobles the heart. This homely type from
Alpine village life furnishes the title and programme for my monthly
magazine."

And to this programme the paper, which has become a home for true
national education, has held faithfully for thirty-four years. Here all
stories, articles, and poems of Rosegger's first appeared, and in this
paper he expresses his views on all vital questions of the day.

"All we poets are foresters and woodwards in the great forest of
mankind," said once Berthold Auerbach, another poet of the people, to
Rosegger. Such a one the editor of the _Heimgarten_ feels himself to
be, expending, as he does, all his ripe experience and loving care upon
the husbandry which has been entrusted to him. To protect the vanishing
traditional customs of his forefathers, their natural conceptions of
right and wrong, the blessing of family life, their healthy
contentment--the outcome of bodily toil and the love of the
home--against the demoralisation of modern hyperculture, is his most
earnest aim.

The principal heroes of his romances are by preference those whose
calling involves the task of cherishing and teaching the people:
schoolmasters and priests. The _Writings of the Forest Schoolmaster_
(1878) is the name of Rosegger's most popular work, which already in
1908 appeared in its seventy-eighth edition, and which, let us hope,
may within the author's lifetime still reach its hundredth edition. The
theme is the gradual emergence of a forest parish from a group of
demoralised and utterly uneducated men to a social organisation, to a
lawful and religiously organised community. A similar _Kulturroman_ is
_Der Gottsucher_ (_The God-seeker_, 1883), which leads us back into
past centuries. A parish has been excommunicated by the Church for
murdering its priest. The people cannot exist without religion, and,
deprived of their old church, they create a new one, a religion of
Nature, by means of which the leader of the community brings back order
and industry to the village. The third novel belonging to this series,
_Das Ewige Licht_ (_The Light Eternal_, 1897), is a pessimistic
counterpart to the _Waldschulmeister_. This treats of the dangers to
religion which arise from modern civilisation. The faithful priest of a
mountain parish has to look on helplessly while the modern world
thrusts itself into the mountain idyll; while the atmosphere of the
great cities, brought up by mountain climbers and summer visitors, and
the smoke from the chimneys of the ever-spreading industrialism in the
valleys below, poison the pure air, and, morally and economically, ruin
the old inhabitants.

But the peasantry has yet another enemy: the love of sport among the
nobility. As once Karl Marx, the theorist of collectivism, studied in
Scotland the expropriation of man from the soil in favour of deer, and
in his _Kapital_ exposed the tragic consequences of such excessive
sport, so now Rosegger in his home must look on at the depopulating of
entire villages. By this means his own birthplace has been nearly
ruined. In his first novel, _Heidepeters Gabriel_, he already shows the
hopeless struggle of the peasant against the devastation of his fields
by game, a struggle which leads to poaching and to prison. And in his
novel _Jacob der Letzte_ (1888), which, from an artistic point of view,
is perhaps the most complete of his works, the principal character, the
last descendant of an old peasant family, who clings tenaciously to the
old soil, is beaten and goes under in the struggle. Such a single case
becomes for Rosegger an alarming symptom of the universal decline of
the free peasantry. "What will come of it?" he asks, when he receives
from numerous parts of Germany letters all witnessing to the same
facts: "I am no practical teacher of political economy, I am only a
poet; but they say that poets are seers, and I verily see that future
generations will have to go home to the land again, that only on the
land can the social question be peacefully and lastingly solved. Here
master and man live on far more friendly footing than in the city, and
come humanly nearer together. For twenty-five years I have been
preaching in every way the return to natural living. I have built my
little house in a peasant village and I live right among the
peasants.--I am utterly dissatisfied with the leading spirits of our
time: they don't teach us to live, they teach us only to think. One
thing we have still to learn--to forget what they have taught us. Our
true Mother is the Earth: from her spring our bread and our ideals."

The return of the townspeople to nature forms the theme of two later
novels, _Erdsegen_ (_The Earth and the Fullness Thereof_, 1900) and
_Weltgift_ (_The Poison of the World_, 1903). In the former the editor
of a paper pledges himself to live a whole year as farm-labourer in
the country. He not only earns his wager, but in the course of the
year so richly experiences and realises the blessedness of life on the
land that, cured of the fever of city life, he marries a village girl
and starts his own farm. This thesis, with its obvious strong purpose,
aroused opposition. The chief objection brought forward was that it
would be impossible for a thoroughly town-bred person to take such deep
root in the country. In reply to this, Rosegger points in the other
novel to the fate of a townsman, who, unlike the character in the
former book, is too full of the city virus for recovery. The poison of
the world has eaten right into him, and he cannot escape his doom.

Rosegger can only compare town and country by the strongest contrast of
light and shade. And in the talks which he collected in 1885 under the
title of _Mountain Sermons, delivered in these latter days in the open
air, and dedicated to the reviling and derision of our Enemies, the
Weaknesses, the Vices and the Errors of Civilisation_, a fanatical
anger is occasionally apparent: one misses the beatitudes which the
title leads one to expect.

And yet love is the gospel which Rosegger proclaims at all times, and
religious questions pervade his writings from first to last. He is
himself, like the chief character in his book, a God-seeker. "Man
creates for himself an ideal, an always nobler image of himself, calls
it God and strives after it. So he climbs as if on a rope ladder,
throwing the upper end higher and higher up the rugged wall of rocks
towards the heaven of perfection. But who taught him to do this? Surely
He who has put the power and spirit of growth in His creature's heart,
God the Father, who from everlasting created the world and will create
it to everlasting."

These conceptions are not exactly canonical, and it has been Rosegger's
experience to have an article of his, _How I picture to myself the
personality of Christ_, confiscated by the licensing authorities as
blasphemous. This induced him twice afterwards openly to state his
convictions; once in _Mein Himmelreich_ (_My Kingdom of Heaven_, 1900),
and again in _I.N.R.I: Frohe Botschaft eines armen Sünders_ (_The
Gospel of a poor Sinner_, 1904). These much-discussed writings give us
an image of Christ as Rosegger made it, putting it together from the
four gospels: a Christ rejoicing in God, intimate with man's heart,
filled with joy of the earth, with mighty creative energy, with
consuming wrath in due season; the Superman, the God-man in the highest
sense.

Rosegger is as strongly opposed to all the violent "Missions" movements
in the Church as to the faith-destroying tendency of the modern world's
point of view. He holds piously by many an old belief, not because it
is for him an article of faith, but because it is a piece of poetic
childhood's remembrance; and he has saved many a dogma for himself by
interpreting it symbolically and not literally. To the most poetic of
his interpretations belongs that of the Cross: "The Cross has a foot
rooted in Earth; that means 'Man, make use of the Earth.' The Cross has
a head that towers up into the air of heaven; that means 'Man, remember
thy ideals.' The Cross has two arms stretching out to right and left,
not to chastise men, but to embrace all the world; that means 'Man,
love thy brothers.' Love, Joy,--those are the two beams of our Cross.
The world is not here as a penance, but a joy." In such sentences as
these is contained Rosegger's whole Gospel of Joy, which looks for its
fulfilment on this side. For him the highest aim of civilisation, as of
religion, is the happiness of mankind.

This brings us to a conclusion. We have now seen Rosegger develop from
peasant to craftsman, to teacher, to preacher. And now another question
arises: Has he not possibly reached a greater height still--is he a
prophet? Of that only late generations may judge; to them it is given
to see whether the new birth of mankind, which Rosegger, like Tolstoy,
looks for from a return to the simplicities of life on the land, will
be realised. With Rosegger's prophecy, which we shall do well to
consider, I close this paper. "The future generations will find peace
and happiness again when they turn back to Nature and give themselves
up to the healthy influences of the life of the soil. As yet, when the
leaves turn yellow, the townsfolk hurry back into their walls; but
there will come a time when the well-to-do citizens will buy land and
farm it themselves like peasants, and when artisans will clear and
reclaim such land from the wilderness itself. They will renounce
hyper-intellectualism, and find pleasure and new vigour in bodily toil;
and they will make laws under which a firm-rooted and honourable
peasantry can once more thrive."

FOOTNOTE:

[1] _Wald-bauer_, one whose farm included forest-land.




I

My Father and I


On the whole I had not a bad bringing up, rather I had none at all.
When I was a good, devout, obedient, apt child, my parents praised me;
when I was the reverse they gave me a downright scolding. Praise almost
always did me good and made me feel inches taller; for some children
like plants shoot up only in sunshine.

But my father was of opinion that I ought not to grow in height only,
but also in breadth, and that to this end reserve and austerity were
good.

My mother was love itself. My father may have been the same by nature,
but he did not know how to express his warm and loving heart. With all
his gentleness this care and labour-laden man had a taciturn, serious
bearing: only later, when he judged me man enough to appreciate it, did
he ever give his rich humour free play before me.

During those years when I was tearing my first dozen pairs of breeches,
he concerned himself with me but little except when I had done
something naughty; then he allowed his severity full play. His
harshness and my punishment generally consisted in his standing over
me, and in loud angry tones, holding up my sin before me and pointing
out the punishment I deserved.

When such an outburst occurred, it was my habit to plant myself in
front of my father and remain standing before him as if petrified, with
my arms hanging down, and looking steadily in his angry face
throughout the vehement rebuke. In my inmost heart I always repented my
wrongdoing and had the clearest sense of guilt; but I also remember
another feeling that used to come over me during those homilies: a
strange trembling, a sense of charm and ecstasy when the storm burst
over my head. Tears came to my eyes and trickled down my cheeks; but I
stood rooted there like a little tree, gazing up at my father, and was
filled with an inexplicable sense of wellbeing, that increased mightily
the longer and louder he thundered.

When after such a scene weeks went by without my concocting mischief,
and my father, kind and silent as ever, went about his business without
taking notice of me, the longing to devise something to put him in a
rage gradually began and ripened in me again. This was not for the sake
of vexing him, for I loved him passionately; nor yet from malice; but
from another cause which I did not understand at the time.

Thus it once happened on the sacred eve of Christmas. In the previous
summer in Maria Zell[2] my father had bought a little black cross on
which hung a Christus in cast lead, and all the instruments of the
Passion in the same material. This treasure had been put safely away
until Christmas Eve, when my father brought it out of his press and set
it on the little house-altar. I profited by the time when my parents
and the rest of our people were still busy on the farm outside and in
the kitchen making ready for the great festival, and, not without
endangering my sound limbs, I reached the crucifix down from the wall,
and crouched down behind the stove with it, and began taking it to
pieces. It was a rare joy to me when with the aid of my little
pocket-knife I loosened first the ladder, then the pincers and hammer,
then Peter's cock, and at last the dear Christ Himself from the cross.
The separated parts seemed to me much more interesting now than before
as a whole; but when I had finished and wanted to put the things
together again and could not, I began to grow hot inside and thought I
was choking. Would it stop at a mere scolding this time? To be sure, I
told myself: the black cross is now much finer than before; there is a
black cross with nothing on it in the chapel in Hohenwang too, and
people go there to pray. Besides, who wants a crucified Lord at
Christmas time? At that time He ought to be lying in the manger--the
Priest said so; and I must see about that now.

I bent the legs of the leaden Christus back and the arms over the
breast, then laid Him reverently in my mother's work-basket, and so set
my crib upon the house-altar; while I hid the cross in the straw of my
parents' bed--forgetting that the basket would betray the taking down
from the cross.

Fate swiftly overtook me. My mother was first to observe how absurdly
the work-basket had got up among the Saints to-day!

"Who can have found the crucifix in his way up there?" asked my father
at the very same moment.

I was standing a little apart, and I felt like a creature thirsting for
strong wine to drink. But at the same time a strange fear warned me to
get still farther into the background if possible.

My father approached me, asking almost humbly if I did not know where
the crucifix had got to? I stood bolt upright before him and looked him
in the face. He repeated his question. I pointed towards the bed-straw;
tears came, but I believe there was no quiver of my lips.

My father searched for and found it, and was not angry, only surprised
when he saw the mishandling of the sacred relic. My craving for the
strong bitter wine grew apace. My father put the bare cross on the
table.

"I can see," he said, speaking with perfect calmness, and he took his
hat down from the nail, "I can see he'll have to be thoroughly punished
at last. When even the Lord Christ Himself is not safe----! Mind you
stay in the room, boy!" he bade me darkly, and then went out to the
door.

"Run after him and beg for pardon!" cried my mother to me. "He's gone
to cut a birch-rod."

I was as if welded to the floor. With horrible clearness I saw what
would befall me, but was quite incapable of taking a single step in
self-defence. My mother went about her work; I stood alone in the
darkening room, the mutilated crucifix on the table before me. The
least sound scared me. Inside the old case of the Black Forest clock
standing there on the floor against the wall, the weights rattled as
the clock struck five. At last I heard someone outside knocking the
snow off his shoes; that was my father's step. When he entered the room
with the birch-rod I had vanished.

He went into the kitchen and demanded in abrupt and angry tones where
the rascal was? Then began a search throughout the whole house; in the
living-room the bed and the corner by the stove and the great coffer
were rummaged through. I heard them moving about in the next room, in
the loft overhead. I heard orders given to search through the very
mangers in the byres and the hay and straw in the barns; they were to
go out to the shed, too, and bring the fellow straight to his
father--he should remember this Christmas Eve all the rest of his life!
But they came back empty-handed. Two farm-hands were to be sent about
among the neighbours; but my mother called out that if I had gone over
the open and through the forest to a neighbour I should certainly be
frozen to death, for my little coat and hat were still in the room.
What grief and vexation children were!

They went away, the house was nearly empty and in the dark room there
was nothing visible but the grey squares of the windows. I was hidden
in the clock-case and could peep through the chinks. I had squeezed in
through the little door meant for winding up the works and let myself
down inside the panelling, so that I was now standing upright in the
clock-case.

What anguish I suffered in my hiding-place! That no good could come of
it all, and that the hourly increasing commotion was certainly working
towards an hourly more dangerous conclusion, I clearly perceived. I
bitterly blamed the work-basket which had betrayed me from the very
beginning, and I blamed the little crucifix; but I quite forgot to
blame my own folly. Hours passed, I was still in my up-on-end coffin,
already the icicles of the clock-weights touched the crown of my head,
and I had to duck myself down as well as I could lest the stopping of
the clock should lead to its winding up and thereby the discovery of
myself. For my parents had at last come back into the room again and
kindled a light and were beginning to quarrel about me.

"I don't know anywhere else to look for him," said my father, and he
sank exhausted on a chair.

"Just think, if he's gone astray in the forest, or if he's lying under
the snow!" cried my mother, and broke into audible weeping.

"Don't say such things!" said my father, "I can't bear to hear it."

"You can't bear to hear it, and yet you yourself have driven him away
with your harshness!"

"I shouldn't have broken any bones with these twigs," he replied, and
brought the birch-rod swishing down upon the table: "but if I catch him
now, I'll break a hedge-pole across his back!"

"Do it, do it!--perhaps it will never hurt him any more!" said my
mother, and wept again. "Do you think that children were given you
only to vent your anger on? In that case our dear Lord is quite right
when He takes them again betimes to Himself. One must love little
children if they're to come to any good!"

Thereupon he said, "Who says that I don't love the boy? I love him with
my whole heart, God knows, but I don't care to tell him so: I don't
care to, and what's more I can't. It doesn't hurt him half as much as
me when I have to punish him, that I _know_!"

"Well, I'm going out for another look!" sighed my mother.

"I can't rest here, neither!" he said.

"You must just swallow a spoonful of warm soup, to please me--it's
supper-time," she said.

"I couldn't eat now, I'm fairly at my wits' end," said my father, and
knelt down by the table and began to pray silently.

My mother went into the kitchen to get together my warm clothes for the
fresh search in case they should find me anywhere, half frozen. The
room was silent again, and I, in the clock-case, felt as if my heart
must burst for sorrow and anguish. Suddenly, in the midst of his
prayer, my father began to sob convulsively. His head fell on his arm
and his whole body shook.

I gave a piercing cry.

A few seconds later I was lifted out of my shell by my parents, and I
fell at my father's feet and clung whimpering to his knee.

"Father, father!" were the only words I could stammer out. He reached
down to me with both his arms, lifted me up to his breast, and my hair
was wet with his tears.

In that moment the eyes of my understanding were opened.

I saw how dreadful it was to anger and offend such a father. But I saw,
too, why I had done so--from sheer longing to see my father's face
before me, to be able to look into his eyes and hear his voice speaking
to _me_. If he could not be cheery as others were with me, and as he,
at that time so care-laden, seldom was, then I would at least look into
his angry eyes, hear his harsh words. They went tingling deliciously
all through me, and drew me to him with irresistible might. At least
they were my father's eyes and words.

No further jar unhallowed our Christmas Eve, and from that day on
things were very different. My father had become deeply aware of his
love for me and my devotion to him; and, in many an hour of play, work,
and rest, bestowed upon me his dear face and kindly conversation, so
that I never again needed to get them by guile.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] A place of pilgrimage in Styria.




II

How I Gave God My Sunday Jacket


The church of the Alpine village of Ratten contains a nearly life-size
equestrian statue, standing to the left of the high altar. The horseman
is a splendid warrior; he wears a crested helmet and moustaches black
as ebony. He has drawn his broad and gleaming sword and is using it to
cut his cloak in half. At the foot of the prancing steed cowers the
figure of a ragged beggar-man.

My mother used to take me to this church when I was still a little
whipper-snapper, hardly up to the height of an ordinary person's
trousers. Near the church stands a lady-chapel, famed for its many
graces; and here my mother loved to pray. Often, when there was not
another soul remaining in the chapel and twelve o'clock struck and the
steeple sent the midday Angelus clanging out across the summer Sunday,
mother would still be kneeling on one of the chairs and sending up her
plaint to Mary. The Blessed Virgin sat on the altar, with her hand in
her lap, and moved not head, nor eyes, nor hands; and so, little by
little, my mother was able to say what she wanted.

I preferred to stop in the church and gaze at the fine rider on his
horse.

And once, when we were on our way home and mother leading me by the
hand (and I had always to take three steps for every one of hers), I
raised my little head to her kind face and asked:

"Why does the man on horseback keep on standing against the wall up
there? Why does he not ride out through the window into the street?"

Then mother answered:

"Because you put such childish questions and because it is only a
statue, the statue of St. Martin, who was a soldier and a very
charitable and pious man and is now in Heaven."

"And is the horse in Heaven too?" I asked.

"I will tell you all about St. Martin," said mother, "when we come to a
nice place where we can sit down and rest."

And she led me on and I skipped along beside her. But I was very
anxious for the resting-place and constantly cried out:

"Mother, here's a nice place!"

But she was not content until we came to the shady wood, where a flat,
mossy stone stood; and then we sat down. Mother fastened her kerchief
tighter round her head and was silent, as though she had forgotten her
promise. I stared and stared at her lips and then peeped through the
trees; and once or twice it appeared to me as though I had seen the
grand horseman riding through the wood.

"Yes, true enough, laddie," mother began, suddenly, "we must always
help the poor, for the love of God. But you won't find many fine
gentlemen like St. Martin nowadays, trotting about on their tall
horses. You know how the icy blast rushes over our sheep-walk, when
winter is nigh--your own little paws were nearly frozen there last
year! Well, it was just such a stretch of heath that St. Martin came
riding over one evening late in autumn. The earth is frozen hard as
stone; and it makes a fine noise each time the horse puts hoof to
ground. The snowflakes dance all round about; not one of them melts
away. Night is just beginning to fall; and the horse clatters over the
heath and the rider draws his white cloak round him as close as ever he
can. Well, as he rides on like that, suddenly he sees a little
beggar-man squatting on a stone, with nothing to cover him but a torn
jacket; and he shivering with cold and lifting his sad eyes to the tall
horse. Whoa! When the horseman sees that, he pulls up his steed and
bends over and says to the beggar, 'Oh, my dear, poor man, what alms
can I give you? Gold and silver I have none; and my sword you could
never use. How can I help you?' Then the beggar lets his white head
fall on his half-naked breast and heaves a sigh. But the horseman draws
his sword, takes his cloak from his shoulders and cuts it across the
middle. One half of the garment he hands down to the poor shivering
grey-beard: 'Take this, my needy brother!' he says. The other half of
the cloak he flings round his own body, as best he can, and rides
away."

This was the story my mother told me; and, with those cold autumn
evenings of hers, she made that lovely midsummer day feel so chilly
that I shivered.

"But it's not quite finished yet, my child," mother continued. "You
know now what the horseman with the beggar in the church means; but you
have not heard what happened afterwards. When the rider, later on at
night, lies sleeping peacefully on his hard bolster at home, the same
beggar whom he met on the heath comes to his bedside, smiles and shows
him the half cloak, shows him the marks of the nails in His hands and
shows him His face, which is no longer old and sorrowful, but radiant
as the sun. This same beggar from the heath was Our Lord
Himself.--There, laddie, and now we must be getting on."

Then we stood up and climbed into the woods on the mountain-side.

On the way home, we met two beggar-men; I peered very closely into
their faces; for I thought:

"Our Lord may be concealed behind one of them."

On the evening of the same day, I was told to take off my Sunday
suit--for father was a thrifty man--and was playing and skipping about
in my shabby workaday breeches, with only the brand-new grey jacket,
which I did not want to take off and had begged to be allowed to wear
for the rest of the day. Mother was attending to her household duties
and I ran out to the sheep-walk, for it was my business to bring the
sheep home to the fold, including a little white lamb that was my own
property.

As I hopped along, throwing stones into the air and trying to hit the
golden evening clouds, suddenly I saw an old, white-headed and very
poorly dressed man squatting on a rock a little way off. I stopped,
greatly startled; dared not take another step; and thought to myself:

"Now this is most certainly Our Lord."

I trembled with fear and joy and simply had no notion what to do.

"If it _is_ Our Lord," I said to myself, "then surely I must give Him
something. If I go home now, so that mother comes and looks out and
sees me and tells me how the matter stands, He might be gone in the
meantime; and that would be disgraceful and ridiculous. I think it is
He beyond a doubt: the one whom the horseman met looked just like
that."

I went a few steps back and began to tear at my grey jacket. It was no
easy work: the coat fitted so tightly over my coarse linen shirt; and I
did not want to be puffing and panting, lest the beggar-man should
notice me too soon. I had a yellow-handled pocket-knife, brand-new and
just lately sharpened. I took it out of my pocket, put the little coat
under my knee and began to divide it down the middle.

It was soon done and I stole up to the beggar-man, who seemed to be
half asleep, and put his part of my coat on his head:

"Take this, my needy brother!" I said, silently, in my thoughts.

Then I put my half of the coat under my arm, gazed at Our Lord a little
longer and then drove the sheep from the walk.

"He is sure to come in the night," I thought, "and then father and
mother will see Him and, if He wishes to stop with us, we can fit up
the back room and the little altar for Him."

I lay in the cupboard-bedstead, beside father and mother, and I could
not sleep. The night passed and He Whom I was expecting did not come.

But, early in the morning, when the barn-door cock crowed the men and
maids out of their beds and when the noisy working-day began in the
yard outside, an old man--he was nicknamed Mushroom Moses--came to my
father, brought him the piece of my jacket which I had given away and
told how I had wantonly cut it the evening before and flung one half at
his head as he was taking a rest on the sheep-walk after hunting for
mushrooms.

Thereupon my father came up softly to my bed, with one hand hidden
behind his back.

"Look here, lad, just you tell me what you've done with your new Sunday
jacket!"

That soft slinking with his hand behind his back at once struck me as
suspicious; and my face fell; and, bursting into tears, I cried:

"Oh, father, I thought I was giving it to God!"

"Lord, lad, what a duffer--what an idiot you are!" cried my father.
"You're much too good for this world and yet quite too silly to die!
What you want is to have your soul thrashed out of your skin with a
stout besom."

And then, when the hand with the twisted birch-rod came in view, I
raised a great hullabaloo.

Mother came rushing up at once. As a rule, she seldom interfered when
father was correcting me; but, this time, she caught hold of his hand
and said:

"I dare say I can sew the jacket together again, father. Come with me:
I have something to tell you."

They both went out into the kitchen; I think they must have discussed
the story of St. Martin. Presently, they came back to the room.

Father said:

"All right now, be quiet; there's nothing going to be done to you."

And mother whispered in my ear:

"It's all right, your wanting to give your jacket to Our Lord; but
it'll be better still if we give it to the poor boy down in the valley.
Our Lord lies hidden in every poor man. St. Martin knew that too, you
see. So there. And now, lad, jump out of bed and get your breeches on;
father's not so very far off yet with that birch of his!"




III

Christmas Eve


Year in, year out, there stood by the grey clay-plastered wall of the
stove in our living-room an oaken footstool. It was always smooth and
clean, for, like the other furniture, it was rubbed every Saturday with
fine river sand and a wisp of straw. In spring, summer, and autumn-time
this stool stood empty and lonely in its corner, save when of an
evening my grandmother pulled it a little forward to kneel on it and
say her evening prayer. On Saturdays, too, while my father said the
prayers for the end of the week, grandmother knelt upon the stool.

But when during the long evenings in late autumn the farm-hands were
cutting small household torches from the resinous logs, and the maids,
along with my mother and grandmother, spinning wool and flax, and all
during Advent time, when old fairy tales were told and hymns were
sung--then I always sat on the stool by the stove.

From out my corner I listened to the stories and songs, and if they
became creepy and my little soul began to be moved with terror, I
shoved the stool nearer to my mother and covertly held on by her dress;
and could not possibly understand how the others still dared to laugh
at me, or at the terrible stories. At last when bedtime came, and my
mother pulled my little box-bed out for me, I simply could not go to
bed alone, and my grandmother must lie beside me until the frightful
visions had faded and I fell asleep.

But with us the long Advent nights were always short. Soon after two
o'clock, the house began to grow restless. In the attics above one
could hear the farm-lads dressing and moving about, and in the kitchen
the maids broke up kindling wood and poked the fire. Then they all went
out to the threshing floor to thresh.

My mother was also up and about, and had kindled a light in the
living-room; soon after that my father rose, and they both put on
somewhat better clothes than they wore on working-days and yet not
their Sunday best. Then mother said a few words to grandmother, who
still lay a-bed, and when I, wakened by the stir, made some sort of
remark, she only answered, "You lie nice and quiet and go to sleep
again!" Then my parents lighted a lantern, extinguished the light in
the room, and left the house. I heard the outer door close, and saw the
gleam of light go glimmering past the window, and I heard the crunching
of footsteps in the snow and the rattling of the house-dog's chain.
Then, save for the regular throb of the threshers at work, all was once
more quiet and I fell asleep again.

My father and mother were going to the Rorate[3] at the parish church,
nearly three hours away. I followed them in my dream. I could hear the
church bell, and the sound of the organ and the Advent song, "Hail
Mary, thou bright morning star!" I saw, too, the lights on the high
altar; and the little angels that stood above it spread out their
golden wings and flew about the church, and the one with the trumpet,
standing over the pulpit, passed out over the heath and into the
forests and blew throughout the whole world that the coming of the
Saviour was near at hand.

When I awoke the sun had long been shining into the windows; outside
the snow glittered and shimmered, and indoors my mother went about
again in workaday clothes and did her household tasks. Grandmother's
bed, next mine, was already made, and she herself now came in from the
kitchen and helped me to put on my breeches, and washed my face with
cold water, that stung me so that I was ready to laugh and cry at the
same moment. That over I knelt on my stool and prayed with grandmother
the morning prayer:

    In Gottes Namen aufstehen
    Gegen Gott gehen,
    Gegen Gott treten,
    Zum Himmlischen Vater beten,
    Dass er uns verleih
    Lieb Engelein drei:

    Der erste, der uns weist,
    Der Zweite, der uns speist,
    Der dritt' der uns behüt' und bewahrt,
    Dass uns an Leib und Seel' nichts widerfahrt.[4]

After these devotions I received my morning soup, and then came
grandmother with a tub full of turnips which we were to peel together.
I sat close beside it on my stool. But in the matter of peeling turnips
I could never quite satisfy grandmother: I constantly cut the rind too
thick, or here and there even left it whole upon the turnip. When,
moreover, I cut my finger and instantly began to cry, my grandmother
said, very crossly, "You're a regular nuisance, it would be a good
thing to pitch you right out into the snow!" All the while she was
binding up my wound with unspeakable love and care.

So passed the Advent season, and grandmother and I talked more and more
often about Christmas Eve and of the Christchild who would so soon be
coming among men.

The nearer we came to the festival the greater the stir in the house.
The men turned the cattle out of the stall and put fresh straw there
and set the mangers and barriers in good order; the cowman rubbed the
oxen till they looked quite smooth; the stockman mixed more hay than
usual in the straw and prepared a great heap of it in the hayloft. The
milkmaid did the same. Threshing had already ceased some days ago,
because, according to our belief, the noise would have profaned the
approaching Holy Day.

Through all the house there was washing and scrubbing; even into the
living-room itself came the maids with their water-pails and straw
wisps and brooms. I always looked forward to the cleaning, because I
loved the turning topsy-turvy of everything, and because the glazed
pictures in the corner where the table was, the brown clock from the
Black Forest with its metal bell, and the various things which, at
other times, I saw only at a distance high above me, were taken down
and brought nearer to me, and I could observe them all much more
closely and from all sides. To be sure, I was not allowed to handle
such things, because I was still too clumsy and careless for that and
might easily damage them. But there were moments in that eager
scrubbing and rubbing when people did not notice me.

In one such moment I climbed from the stool to the bench, and from the
bench to the table, which was pushed out of its place and on which lay
the Black Forest clock. I made for the clock, whose weights hung over
the edge of the table, looked through an open side-door into the very
dusty brass works, tapped several times on the little cogs of the
winding-wheel, and at last even laid my finger on the wheel itself to
see if it would go; but it didn't. Eventually I gently pushed a small
stick of wood, and as I did so the works began to rattle frightfully.
Some of the wheels went slowly, others quicker, and the winding-wheel
flew round so fast that one could hardly see it at all. I was
indescribably frightened, and rolled from the table over bench and
stool down on to the wet, dirty floor; then my mother gripped me by my
little coat--and there, sure enough, was the birch-rod![5] The whirring
inside the clock would not leave off, and finally my mother laid hold
of me with both hands, carried me into the entrance, pushed me through
the door and out into the snow, and shut the door behind me. There I
stood like one undone; I could hear my mother--whom I must have
offended badly--still scolding within doors, and the laughing and
scrubbing of the maids, and through it all the whirring of the clock.

When I had stood there sobbing for a while and still nobody came to
call me back into the house, I set off for the path that was trodden in
the snow, and I went through the home meadow and across the open land
towards the forest. I did not know whither I would go, I only conceived
that a great wrong had been done me and that I could never go home
again.

But I had not reached the forest when I heard a shrill whistle behind
me. That was the whistle my grandmother made when she put two fingers
in her mouth, pointed her tongue, and blew. "Where are you going, you
stupid child?" she cried. "Take care; if you run about in the forest
like that, Moss-Maggie will catch you! Look out!"

At this word I instantly turned round, for I feared Moss-Maggie
unspeakably. But I did not go home yet. I hung about in the farmyard,
where my father and two of our men had just killed a pig. Watching them
I forgot what had happened to myself, and when my father set about
skinning it in the outhouse I stood by holding the ends of the skin,
which with his big knife he gradually detached from the carcase. When
later on the intestines had been taken out and my mother was pouring
water into the basin, she said to me, "Run away or you'll get
splashed."

From the way in which she spoke I could tell that my mother was once
more reconciled with me and all was right again; and when I went into
the dwelling-room to warm myself a bit, everything was back in its own
place. Floor and walls were still moist, but scrubbed clean, and the
Black Forest clock was once more hanging on the wall and ticking. And
it ticked much louder and clearer than before through the freshly
ordered room.

At last the washing and scrubbing and polishing came to an end, the
house grew peacefuller, almost silent, and the Sacred Vigil was upon
us. On Christmas Eve we used not to have our dinner in the living-room,
but in the kitchen, where we made the large pastry-board our table, and
sat round it and ate the simple fasting fare silently, but with
uplifted hearts.

The table in the dwelling-room was covered with a snow-white cloth, and
beside it stood my stool, upon which, when the twilight fell, my
grandmother knelt and prayed silently.

The maids went quietly about the house and got their holiday clothes
ready, and mother put pieces of meat in a big pot and poured water on
them and set it on the open fire. I stole softly about the room on
tiptoe and heard only the jolly crackling of the kitchen fire. I gazed
at my Sunday breeches and coat and the little black felt hat which were
ready hanging on a nail in the wall, and then I looked through the
window out at the oncoming dusk. If no rough weather set in I was to be
allowed to go with the head farm-servant, Sepp, to the midnight Mass.
And the weather was quiet, and moreover, according to my father, it was
not going to be very cold, because the mist lay upon the hills.

Just before the "censing," in which, following ancient custom, house
and farm were blessed with holy water and incense, my father and my
mother fell out a little. Maggie the Moss-gatherer had been there to
wish us all a blessed Christmastide, and my mother had presented her
with a piece of meat for the feast-day. My father was somewhat vexed at
this; in other ways, he was a good friend to the poor, and not seldom
gave them more than we could well spare; but in his opinion one ought
not to give Moss-Maggie any alms whatever. The Moss-gatherer was a
woman not belonging to our neighbourhood, who went wandering around in
the forests without permission, collecting moss and roots, making fires
and sleeping in the half-ruined huts of charcoal-burners. Besides that,
she went begging to the farmhouses, offering moss for sale, and if she
did but poor business there she wept and railed at her life. Children
at whom she looked were sore terrified, and many even became ill; and
she could make cows give red milk. Whoever showed her kindness, she
would follow for several minutes, saying, "May God reward you a
thousand and a thousandfold right up into heaven!" But to anyone who
mocked, or in any other way whatsoever offended her, she said, "I pray
you down into the nethermost hell!"

Moss-Maggie often came to us, and she loved to sit before
the house on the grass, or on the stile over the hedge, in
spite of the loud barking and chain-clanking of our house-dog,
who showed singular violence towards this woman. She would remain
there until my mother took her out a cup of milk or a bit of
bread. My mother was glad when Moss-Maggie thereupon gave her a
thousandfold-right-up-to-heaven-may-God-reward-you; but my father
considered the wish of this person worthless, whether as curse or
blessing.

Some years earlier, when they were building the school-house in the
village, this woman had come to the place with her husband and helped
at the work, until one day the man was killed at stone-blasting. Since
then she had worked no more, nor did she go away; but she just idled
about, nobody knowing what she did nor what she wanted. She could never
again be persuaded to do any work--she seemed to be crazed.

The magistrate had several times sent Moss-Maggie out of the district,
but she always returned. "She wouldn't always be coming back," said my
father, "if she got nothing by begging in the neighbourhood. As it is
she'll just stay about here, and when she's old and ill, we shall have
to nurse her as well: it's a cross that we ourselves have tied round
our necks."

My mother said nothing in reply to such words, but when Moss-Maggie
came she still gave the usual alms, and to-day in honour of the great
feast a little more.

Hence then arose the little dispute between my father and mother, which
however was at once silenced when two farm-hands bearing the incense
and holy water entered the house. After the censing my father placed a
lighted candle on the table; to-day pine-splinters might only be burned
in the kitchen. Supper was once again eaten in the living-room. During
supper the head farm-servant told us all manner of wonderful stories.

When we had finished my mother sang a shepherd's song. Rapturously as I
listened to these songs at other times, to-day I could think of nothing
but the churchgoing, and longed above everything to get at once into my
Sunday clothes. They assured me there would be time enough for that
later on; but at last my grandmother yielded to my urgent appeal and
dressed me. The cowman dressed himself very carefully in his festal
finery, because he was not going home after the midnight mass, but
would stay in the village till morning. About nine o'clock the other
farm-servants and the maids were also ready, and they kindled a torch
at the candle flame. I held on to Sepp, the head servant; and my
parents and grandmother, who stayed at home to take care of the house,
sprinkled me with holy water that I might neither fall nor freeze to
death. Then we started off.

It was very dark, and the torch, borne before us by the cowman, threw
its red light in a great disk on the snow, and the hedge, the
stone-heaps and the trees past which we went. This red illumination,
which was broken too by the great shadows of our bodies, seemed very
awful to me, and I clung fearfully to Sepp, until he remarked, "Look
here, leave me my coat; what should I do if you tore it off my back?"

For a time the path was very narrow, so that we had to go one behind
the other, and I was only thankful that I was not the last, for I
imagined that he for certain must be exposed to endless dangers from
ghosts.

There was a cutting wind and the glowing splinters of the torch flew
far afield, and even when they fell on the hard snow-crust they still
glowed for a while.

So far we had gone across open ground and down through thickets and
forest; now we came to a brook which I knew well--it flowed through the
meadow where we made hay in summer. Then the brook had been noisy
enough; to-day one could only hear it murmur and gurgle, for it was
frozen over. We passed along by a mill where I was badly scared because
some sparks flew on to the roof; but there was snow lying upon it and
the sparks were quenched. When we had gone some way along the valley,
we left the brook and the way led upwards through a dark wood where the
snow lay very shallow but had no such firm surface as out in the open.

At last we came to a wide road, where we could walk side by side, and
now and again we heard sleigh-bells. The torch had already burned right
down to the cowman's hand, and he kindled another that he had with him.
On the road were visible several other lights--great red torches that
came flaring towards us as if they were swimming in the black air,
behind which first one and then several more faces of the churchgoers
gradually emerged, who now joined company with us. And we saw lights on
other hills and heights, that were still so far off we could not be
sure whether they were still or moving.

So we went on. The snow crunched under our feet, and wherever the wind
had carried it away, there the black patch of bare ground was so hard
that our shoes rang upon it. The people talked and laughed a great
deal, but this seemed not a bit right to me in the holy night of
Christmas. I could only think all the while about the church and what
it must be like when there is music and High Mass in the dead of night.

When we had been going for a long time along the road and past isolated
trees and houses, then again over fields and through a wood, I suddenly
heard a faint ringing in the tree-tops. When I wanted to listen, I
couldn't hear it; but soon after I heard it again, and clearer than the
first time. It was the sound of the little bell in the church steeple.
The lights which we saw on the hills and in the valley became more and
more frequent, and we could now see that they were all hastening
churchwards.

The little calm stars of the lanterns floated towards us, and the road
was growing livelier all the time. The small bell was relieved by a
greater, and this one went on ringing until we had almost reached the
church. So it was true, what grandmother had said: at midnight the
bells begin to ring, and they ring until the very last dweller in the
farthest valleys has come to church.

The church stands on a hill covered with birches and firs, and round it
lies the little God's-acre encircled by a low wall. The few houses of
the village are down in the valley.

When the people came close to the church, they extinguished their
torches by sticking them head downwards in the snow. Only one was
fixed between two stones in the churchyard wall, and left burning.

And now from the steeple in slow, rhythmical swing, rang out the great
bell. A clear light shone through the high, narrow windows. I longed to
go into the church; but Sepp said there was still plenty of time, and
stayed where he was, laughing and talking with other young fellows and
filling himself a pipe.

At last all the bells pealed out together; the organ began to play
inside the church, and then we all went in. There it looked quite
different from what it did on Sundays. The candles burning on the altar
were clear, white, beaming stars, and the gilded tabernacle reflected
them most gloriously. The lamp of the sanctuary light was red. The
upper part of the church was so dark that one could not see the
beautiful painting of the nave. Mysterious shapes of men were seated in
the chairs, or standing beside them; the women were much wrapped up in
shawls and were coughing. Many had candles burning in front of them,
and they sang out of their books when the _Te Deum_ rang out from the
chancel.

Sepp led me between two rows of chairs towards a side altar, where
several people were standing. There he lifted me up on to a stool
before a glass case, which, lighted by two candles, was placed between
two branches of fir trees, and which I had never seen before when I
went to church with my parents. When Sepp had set me on the stool, he
said softly in my ear, "There, now you can have a look at the crib."
Then he left me standing, and I gazed in through the glass. Thereupon
came a friendly little woman and whispered, "Look here, child, if you
want to see that, somebody ought to explain it to you." And she told me
who the little figures were. I looked at them. Save for the Mother
Mary, who had a blue wrapped garment round her head which fell down to
her very feet, all the figures represented mere human beings: the men
were dressed just like our farm-servants or the elder peasants. Even
St. Joseph wore green stockings and short chamois-leather breeches.

When the _Te Deum_ was over, Sepp came back, lifted me from the stool,
and we sat down on a bench. Then the sacristan went round lighting all
the candles that were in the church, and every man, including Sepp,
pulled a little candle out of his pouch, lighted it, and fastened it on
to the desk in front of him. Now it was so bright in the church that
one could see the paintings on the roof clearly enough.

Up in the choir they were tuning fiddles and trumpets and drums, and,
just as the little bell on the door of the sacristy rang, and the
priest in his glittering vestments, accompanied by acolytes and tall
lantern-bearers, passed over the crimson carpet to the altar, the organ
burst forth in all its strength, joined by a blast of trumpets and roll
of drums.

The incense smoke was rising, and shrouding the shining high altar in a
veil. Thus the High Mass began, and thus it shone and sounded and rang
in the middle of the night. Throughout the offertory all the
instruments were silent, only two clear voices sang a lovely
shepherd-song; and during the Benedictus a clarionet and two horns slow
and softly crooned the cradle-song. During the Gospel and the Elevation
we heard the cuckoo and nightingale in the choir, just as in the midst
of the sunny spring-time.

Deep down in my soul I understood it, the wonder and splendour of
Christmas. But I did not exclaim with delight; I remained grave and
silent, I felt the solemn glory of it all. But while the music was
playing I could not help thinking about father and mother and
grandmother at home. They are kneeling by the table now in the light of
the single candle, and praying; or they are even asleep, and the room
is all dark--only the clock ticking--while a deep peace lies upon the
forest-clad mountains, and the Eve of Christmas is spread abroad over
all the earth.

The little candles in the seats were burning themselves out, one after
another, as the service neared its close at last; and the sacristan
went round again and extinguished the lights on the walls and altars
and before the pictures with the little tin cap. Those on the high
altar were still burning when a joyous march music sounded from the
choir and the folk went crowding out of the incense-laden church.

When we came outside, in spite of the thick mist which had descended
from the hills, it was no longer quite so dark as before midnight. The
moon must have risen; no more torches were lighted. It struck one
o'clock, but the schoolmaster was already ringing the prayer bell for
Christmas morning.

I glanced once more at the church windows. All the festal shine was
quenched, I saw only the dull red glimmer of the sanctuary lamp.

And now, when I wanted to renew my hold on Sepp's coat, he was no
longer there: I found myself among strangers, who talked together for a
little, and then immediately set out for their several homes. My guide
must be already on ahead. I hurried after him, running quickly past
several people, hoping soon to overtake him. I ran as hard as my little
feet were able, going through a dark wood and across fields over which
such a keen wind was blowing, that warm as I otherwise was I scarcely
felt my nose and ears at all. I passed houses and clumps of trees; the
people who were still on the road a short time before had dropped off
little by little; I was all alone, and still I hadn't overtaken Sepp. I
thought he might just as well be still behind me, but I determined to
hurry straight home. Here and there I saw black spots on the road, the
charcoal that folk had shaken down from their torches on their way to
church. I made up my mind not to look at the bushes and little trees
which stood beside the way and loomed eerily out of the mist, for they
scared me. I was specially frightened whenever a path cut straight
across the road, because that was a cross-road, where on Christmas Eve
the Evil One loves to stand, and has chinking treasure with him with
which he entices the hapless children of men to himself. It is true the
cowman had said he did not believe it, but such things must be or
people would not talk so much about them. I was very agitated; I turned
my eyes in all directions, lest a ghost should be somewhere making for
me. Then I determined to think no more of such nonsense; but the harder
I made up my mind, the more I thought about it.

And now I had reached the path which should take me down through the
forest and into the valley. I turned aside and ran along under the
long-branched trees. Their tops rustled loudly, and now and again a
great lump of snow fell down beside me. Sometimes it was so dark that I
did not see the trunks until I ran up against them; and then I lost the
path. This I did not mind very much, for the snow was shallow and the
ground nice and level. But gradually it began to grow steep and
steeper, and there were a lot of brambles and heather under the snow.
The tree-stems were no longer spaced so regularly, but were scattered
about, many leaning all awry, many with torn-up roots resting against
others, and many, in a wild confusion of up-reaching branches, lying
prone upon the ground. I did not remember seeing all this on our
outward journey. Sometimes I could hardly get on at all, but had to
wriggle in and out through the bushes and branches. Often the
snow-crust gave way under me, and then the stiff heather reached right
up to my chest. I realised I had lost the right path, but told myself
that when I was once in the valley and beside the brook I should follow
that along and so was bound to come at last to the mill and our own
meadows.

Lumps of snow fell into the pockets of my coat, snow clung to my little
breeches and stockings, and the water ran down into my shoes. At first
all that clambering over fallen trees and creeping through undergrowth
had tired me, but now the weariness had vanished; I didn't heed the
snow, and I didn't heed the heather, nor the boughs that so often
scratched me roughly about the face, but I just hurried on. I was
constantly falling, but as quickly picking myself up again. Then, too,
all fear of ghosts was gone; I thought of nothing but the valley and
our house. I had no notion how long I had been astray in the
wilderness, but felt strong and nimble, terror spurring me on.

Suddenly I found myself standing on the brink of a precipice. Down in
the abyss a grey fog lay, with here and there a tree-top rising out of
it. The forest was sparser about me, it was bright overhead and the
half-moon stood in the sky. Before me, and away beyond that, there was
nothing but strange cone-shaped, forest-clad mountains.

Down there in the depths must be the valley and the mill. It seemed to
me as if I heard the murmur of the brook; but it was only the soughing
of the wind in the forest on the farther side.

I went to right and to left, searching for a footpath that might take
me down, and I found a place where I thought I should be able to lower
myself by the help of the loose rocks which lay about, and of the
juniper bushes. In this I succeeded for a little, but only just in time
I clutched hold of a root--I had nearly pitched over a perpendicular
cliff. After that I could go no farther, but sank in sheer exhaustion
to the ground. In the depths below lay the fog with the black
tree-tops. Save for the soughing of the wind in the forest, I heard
nothing. I did not know where I was. If only a deer would come I would
ask my way of it; quite probably it would be able to direct me, for
everyone knows that on Christmas Eve the beasts can talk like men.

I got up to climb back again, but only loosened the rocks and made no
progress. Hands and feet were aching. I stood still and called for
Sepp as loud as ever I could. Lingering and faint, my voice fell back
from the forests and cliffs. Then again I heard nothing but the
soughing of the wind.

The frost was cutting right into my limbs. "Sepp! Sepp!" I shouted once
more with all my might. Again nothing but the long-drawn-out echo. Then
a fearful anguish took possession of me. I called quickly, one after
another, my parents, my grandmother, all the farm-hands and maids of
our household by name. It was all in vain.

I began to cry miserably.

There I stood trembling, my body throwing a long shadow aslant down the
naked rock. I went to and fro along the ledge to warm myself a little,
and I prayed aloud to the holy Christchild to save me.

The moon stood high in the dark heavens.

I could no longer cry or pray, I could scarcely move any more. I
crouched down shivering on a stone and said to myself, "I shall go to
sleep now; it's all only a dream, and when I wake up I shall either be
at home or in heaven."

Then on a sudden I heard a rustling in the juniper bushes above me, and
soon after I felt that something was touching me and lifting me up. I
wanted to scream, but I couldn't--my voice was frozen within me. Fear
and anguish kept my eyes fast shut. Hands and feet, too, were as if
lamed, I could not move them. Then I felt warm, and it seemed to me as
if all the mountain rocked with me.

When I came to myself and awoke it was still night; but I was standing
at the door of my home and the house-dog was barking furiously.
Somebody had let me slip down on the hard-trodden snow, and had then
knocked loudly on the door and hurried away. I had recognised this
somebody; it was the Moss-wife.

The door opened, and grandmother threw herself upon me with the words,
"Jesus Christ, here he is!"

She carried me into the warm living-room, but from thence quickly back
again into the entrance. There she set me on the bread-trough, and
hastened outside and blew her most piercing whistle.

She was quite alone. When Sepp had come back from church and not found
me at home, and when, too, the others came and I was with none of them,
they had all gone down into the forest and through the valley and up
the other side to the high road, and in all directions. Even my mother
had gone with them, and everywhere, all the time, had called out my
name.

So soon as my grandmother believed it could no longer harm me, she
carried me back into the warm room, and when she drew off my shoes and
stockings they were quite frozen together and almost frozen to my feet.
Thereupon she again hurried out of doors, whistled again, brought some
snow in a pail, and set me barefoot down in it. Standing thus I felt
such a violent pain in my toes that I groaned; but grandmother said,
"That's all right; if it hurts, your feet aren't frozen."

Soon after that the red morning light shone in through the window, and
one by one all the farm-hands came home. At length my father, and quite
last of all--when the red disk of the sun was rising over the
Wechselalpe, and after grandmother had whistled countless times--came
my mother. She came to my little bed, where they had tucked me up, my
father sitting beside me. She was quite hoarse.

She said I ought to go to sleep now, and she covered the window with a
cloth so that the sun should not shine in my face. But my father seemed
to think I ought not to go to sleep yet: he wanted to know how I had
got away from the servant without his noticing it, and where I had been
wandering. I at once related how I had lost the path, and how I got
into the wilderness; and when I had told them about the moon and the
black forests, and about the soughing of the wind and the rocky
precipice, my father said under his breath to my mother, "Wife, let us
give God praise and thanks that he is here--he has been on the Troll's
rock!"

At these words my mother gave me a kiss on the cheek, a thing she did
but seldom, and then she put her apron before her face and went away.

"Well, you young scaramouch, and how did you get home after all?" asked
my father. I said I didn't know; that after a prolonged sleeping and
rocking, I found myself at our door, and that Moss-Maggie had stood
beside me. My father asked me yet again about this circumstance, but I
told him I hadn't got anything else to say about it.

My father then said he must be off to High Mass in the church, because
to-day was Christmas Day; and he bade me go to sleep.

I must have slept many hours after that, for when I awoke it was
twilight outside, and in the dwelling-room it was nearly dark. My
grandmother sat nodding beside my bed, and from the kitchen I heard the
crackling of the fire on the hearth.

Later, when the servants were all sitting at the evening meal,
Moss-Maggie was with them at table. During the morning service she had
been out in the churchyard, cowering on her husband's grave; and after
High Mass my father went and found her there and brought her with him
to our house.

They could get nothing out of her about the event of the night, save
that she had been searching for the Christchild in the forest. Then she
came over to my bed and looked at me, and I was scared at her eyes.

In the back part of our house was a room in which there were only old,
useless things and a lot of cobwebs. This room my father gave
Moss-Maggie for a dwelling, and put a stove and a bed and a table in it
for her.

And she stayed with us. She would still very often go rambling about in
the forest, and bring home moss, and then return and sit for hours upon
her husband's grave; from which she could never more tear herself away
to return to her own district--where, indeed, she would have been just
as lonely and homeless as everywhere else. Of her circumstances we
could learn nothing more definite: we could only conjecture that the
woman had once been happy and certainly in her right mind; and that
grief for the loss of her mate had robbed her of reason.

We all loved her, for she lived peacefully and contentedly with all and
caused nobody the least trouble. The house-dog alone, it seemed, would
never trust her, he barked and tore furiously at the chain whenever she
came across the home meadow. But the creature was meaning something
quite different than we thought, all the time; for once when the chain
broke he rushed to the woman, leapt whining into her bosom and licked
her cheeks.

At last in the late autumn, when Moss-Maggie was almost always in the
graveyard, there came a time when, instead of barking cheerily, the dog
howled by the hour together, so that my grandmother, herself very worn
and weary by then, said, "You mark my words; there'll soon be somebody
dying in our neighbourhood now, when the dog howls like that! God
comfort the poor soul!"

And a little while after that Moss-Maggie fell ill, and when winter
came she died.

       *       *       *       *       *

In her last moments she held both my father and mother by the hand and
uttered the words, "May God requite you a thousand and a thousandfold,
right up into heaven itself!"

FOOTNOTES:

[3] A morning service of the Catholic Church held during Advent.

[4]

    In God's name let us arise
    Towards God to go,
    Towards God to take our way,
    To the Heavenly Father to pray,
    That He lend to us
    Dear little angels three:

    The first to guide us,
    The second to feed us,
    The third to shelter and protect us
    That nothing mischance us in body or soul.


[5] The birchen Lizzie--_Die birkene Liesel_.




IV

A Last Will and Testament


When of a Saturday evening my father sat at his shaving I had to creep
under the table because it was dangerous above.

When my father sat shaving himself, and when he had lathered his cheek
and lips to such a snowy whiteness that he looked like the herd-boy
after he has been lapping cream behind the milkmaid's back; when,
further, he sharpened his gleaming razor on his brown-leather braces
and then passed it slowly over his cheek, he would straightway begin to
twist mouth, cheeks, and nose--indeed, his whole countenance--in such a
fashion as made his dear kind face quite unrecognisable. He drew both
lips deep into his mouth, till he was like nothing so much as old
neighbour Veit who had lost all his teeth; or he stretched his mouth
crosswise, from left to right, like Köhler-Sani scolding his hens; and
he screwed one eye up tight and blew out a cheek, for all the world
like poor Tinili the tailor, after his virago wife had been caressing
him. All the funniest faces in the whole neighbourhood came to my mind
in turn when my father sat at his shaving. And that set me off.

At this point my father, still friendly, would say, "Do be quiet,
laddie." But scarcely had he spoken when again there came such a
wonderful face that I simply couldn't help laughing outright. He peered
into the little looking-glass, and I fully expected to see his
distorted features relax into a smile. Then he suddenly called out,
"If you're not quiet, boy, I'll break the shaving-brush over your
pate!"

It was now high time to creep under the table, where my smothered
giggles kept me shaking like a wet poodle. After that he could shave
peacefully and without danger of breaking out into untimely mirth over
his own or my grimaces.

And so it came to pass one winter evening that my father was sitting
before the soap-bowl and I under the table when I heard someone in the
entrance stamping the snow from his boots. A moment later the door
opened and in came a big man whose thick red beard had icicles hanging
from it just like our shingle roof outside. He at once sat down on a
bench, drew a big tobacco-pipe from under his homespun cloak, gripped
it between his front teeth, and, while striking a light, remarked,
"Having a shave, Farmer?"

"Yes, I'm having a bit of a shave," answered my father, and went on
scraping with the razor, and cut a really God-forsaken grimace.

"That's all right," said the stranger.

And later, when he was quite hidden in tobacco smoke and the icicles
were dripping from his beard, he uttered himself thus:

"I don't know if so be you know me or not, Farmer. Five year agone I
passed your place and took a drink of water at your spring. I come from
Stanz; I'm Frau Drachenbinder's farm-hand, and I've come about the
matter of that big lad of yours."

Under the table, I went hot to the tips of my toes at these words. My
father had but one big lad at the time, and that was myself. I drew
back into the darkest corner.

"Come about my boy?" returned my father. "You can have him if you want
him--we can easily spare him; he's just too bad for anything!"

(Peasant folk are very fond of talking like that for the sake of
teasing and overaweing their forward children.)

"Come, come, Farmer! Not so bad as all that! Frau Drachenbinder wants
to get something written down--a will or some such matter--and she
don't know anybody, far and wide, that's a good writing scholar. But
now she's heard tell that the farmer at Vorderalpel has got an uncommon
kind of boy that can do such things as that with his little finger
alone! And so she's sent me off here, and I was to beg of you, Farmer,
if you'd be so kind as to lend her the loan of the boy over there for a
day. She'll soon pack him off back again, and give him something for
his trouble as well."

When I heard him say that I rattled my shoe-tips against the table
legs: that wouldn't come at all amiss, I thought.

"Go along with you!" said my father when he had scratched one cheek
quite smooth. "However is my small boy to go to Stanz in the dead of
winter? It must be at least a four hours' walk!"

"Just so," answered the big man, "and that's why I'm here. He's only
got to climb up on my back and open his legs and shove 'em along past
my ribs, both sides of me, towards the front, where I'll lay hold of
them; and then he must hug me round the neck with his hands, like as if
he was my sweetheart, so that he don't go falling off backwards."

"I see," replied my father; "you needn't make such a talk about a
pig-a-back ride!"

"Well, after that I'll manage all right, and when Sunday comes I'll
bring him back home again."

"I'm not afraid of your not bringing him back safe and sound," said my
father; "and if Frau Drachenbinder really wants to have something
written down, and seeing that you're her man, and if the lad will go
with you--there's no objection so far as I'm concerned."

He uttered these words with a smooth, ordinary countenance.

A little later I was rigged out in my Sunday clothes. Elated with my
so suddenly acquired importance I strutted up and down the room.

"You wandering Jew, you!" exclaimed my father. "Haven't you got
anything to sit upon?"

But there was no more peace for me. Better than anything I should have
liked to settle myself there and then on the big man's broad back, and
ride straight away. But just then my mother came in bringing a steaming
savoury dish, saying, "Eat that, you two, before you start off!"

Not in vain did she say it. I had never yet seen our biggest wooden
spoon piled up so high as then when the strange big man plied it
between the meat-platter and his bearded mouth. But I walked up and
down all the while and thought about how I was going to become Frau
Drachenbinder's scrivener.

Presently, when matters had gone so far that my mother could turn the
dish upside-down on the hearth without a crumb falling out, I hopped up
on to the man's back, held on hard by his beard, and rode away in the
name of God.

The sun was already setting; the valleys were full of blue shadow; the
far snow-heights of the Alps were a dull rose-colour.

So long as my nag was trotting uphill over the bare pastures the snow
bore his weight well, but when he came in among the young larch and
pine-woods the surface became treacherous and broke under him. He was
prepared for that, however. When he came up to an old hollow larch with
wild arms stretching out into the air, he pulled up, thrust his right
hand into the dark cavity, and fished out a pair of snow-shoes of woven
willow which he bound under his shoe-soles. Upon these wide things he
began the pilgrimage anew. Progress was slow, for in order to manage
the shoes he must keep them far apart; but with such duck's feet there
was no more breaking through.

Suddenly--it was already dark and the stars shining clear--my mount
began to undo my shoes, pulled them clean off my feet and put them away
in his turned-up apron. Then he said, "Now, laddie, stick your little
hoofs in my breeches pocket, so that your toes don't freeze off." He
took my hands in his own and breathed warm breath upon them--and that
was instead of gloves.

The cold bit my cheeks, the snow creaked under the snow-shoes; I rode
on lonely through the forest and over the heights. I rode all along the
ridge of the Hochbürstling, where even in summer I had never yet been.
Now and again, when progress was too deliberate, I pressed my knees
into the yielding flesh, and my horse took it all in good part, going
on as well as ever he could--there was no doubt about his knowing the
way! I rode past a post whereon, summer and winter, that holy patron of
cattle, St. Erhardi, stood. I knew St. Erhardi at home, he and I
between us had charge of my father's herd. He was always much
carefuller than I: if a cow came to grief, I the herdboy was blamed; if
the others throve, St. Erhardi got the credit for it.--It did my heart
good he should see that I had become a horseman while he stood there
nailed to his post for ever and ever.

At last our path took a turn and I began riding downwards over stumps
and stones, making towards a little light that glimmered in the valley
below. And just when all the trees and places had passed me by and I
had nothing but the dark mass with the one little pane of shining light
before me, my good Christopher came to a halt and said, "Now look here,
my dear boy--seeing as how I'm a stranger to you and you've come with
me like this without taking thought what you were doing--how d'you know
that I mayn't have got a life-long grudge against your father and am
just now going to carry you into a robbers' den?"

I listened a moment. Then, as he added nothing to these words, I
answered in the same tone:

"Considering my father trusted me to Frau Drachenbinder's man and that
I've come with him like this, it's not likely Drachenbinder's man has
got a grudge against us, and he won't carry me into a robbers' den."

At these words of mine the man snorted into his beard, and soon after
he lowered me on to the stump of a tree, saying, "And now here we are
at Frau Drachenbinder's house."

He opened a door in the dark mass and went in.

The small living-room had a stove with glowing embers on it, a burning
pine-splinter,[6] and a straw bed with a child asleep on it. Near it
stood a woman, very old and bent and with a face as pallid and creased
as the coarse nightgown she was wearing. As we entered, this person
uttered a strange cry, a sort of crowing, began to laugh violently, and
then hid herself behind the stove.

"That's Frau Drachenbinder," remarked my guide. "She'll soon come and
speak to you, and meantime you sit down there on the stool near the bed
and put on your shoes again."

I did what he bade me, and he seated himself on a block of wood near
by.

When the woman became composed, she moved lightly about the stove and
soon brought us a steaming grey meal-soup in an earthenware pot, and
two bone spoons with it. My man ate solemnly and steadily, but I
couldn't quite fancy it. Then he got up and said softly to me, "Sleep
well, boy!" and went away. And when I found myself alone in the close
room with the sleeping child and the old woman I began to feel
downright creepy.

Frau Drachenbinder came up to me, laid her light, lean hand on my
cheek, and said, "I thank the dear Lord God that you've come!--It's
barely six months since my daughter died. That there"--she pointed to
the child--"is my young branch--such a dear mite--he's my heir. And
now I hear Death knocking at the door again. I'm very old. I've saved
all my life--I'm going to beg my coffin from kind folks' charity. My
husband died long ago and left this little house to me. My illnesses
have cost me the house--but they weren't worth it. Whatever I leave
behind me is for my grandchild's very own. As yet he's too young to
take it into his heart, and I can't give it into any man's hand, and so
I want to have it written down so that it's kept. I won't do it through
the schoolmaster in Stanz, and the doctor can't do it without the
stamp-duty. And then people told me about the son of the farmer at
Vorderalpel, and how he was such a scholar that he could write out
people's last wills without the stamp! That's why I've had you brought
all this long way. Do this favour for me to-morrow, and to-night go and
get a good rest."

She ushered me, by the light of the burning splinter, into the little
room adjoining. It was made only of boards. A bed of hay, with a
covering in the shape of the woman's thick, best Sunday dress, was
there, and in a corner stood a little brown church with two small
towers in which little bells were set a-tinkling whenever one trod the
shaky floor. Frau Drachenbinder stuck the burning pine-wood in the
window of one of the towers, made the sign of the cross on me with her
thumb, and then I was alone in the room. It was cold: I was shivering
with the bitter winter, and with a fear of my hostess too, but, before
ever I crept into my nest, curiosity impelled me to open the door of
the little church. Out sprang a mouse who had just made her supper off
the gold-paper altar and St. Joseph's cardboard hand. Saints and angels
were there within, and gay banners and wreaths--it was a lovely toy. I
thought to myself that this must be Frau Drachenbinder's parish church,
for the little body was far too feeble to walk to Stanz for mass. I
said my evening prayer before it, asking Our Lord to protect me during
that night; then I extinguished the splinter so that it should not burn
right down to the window-frame, and after that laid myself down on the
hay, in God's name.

It seemed to me as if I had been torn away from myself and were some
learned clerk in a far-away cold house, while the real boy of the
forest farm was sleeping at home in his own warm little nest. Just as I
was falling asleep I heard the short, sharp cries of joy again in the
living-room, and soon after that the loud laughter. Whatever was it
that delighted her so much, and at whom was she laughing? I was
terrified, and thought of running away. One of the boards could be
easily shifted, but then--the snow!

Only towards morning did I fall asleep, and I dreamed and dreamed about
a red mouse that had bitten off the right hand of all the saints in the
church. And my father was looking out of the window of the tower with
his lathered, distorted cheeks and holding a lighted pine-splinter in
his mouth: and I sobbed and giggled together, and was hot with fear.
When at last I awoke I thought I was in a cage with silver bars, for so
the white daylight looked through the vertical cracks in the woodwork.
And when I went outside the house door I was astonished to see how
narrow the ravine was, and how high and wintry the mountains.

Within doors the child was screaming, and then Frau Drachenbinder broke
out into her jubilant cries again.

At breakfast there was my horse again, but he hardly spoke at all,
giving all his attention to his food; and when that was finished he got
up, put on his huge hat, and went off to church at Stanz.

When the old woman had comforted the child, fed the fowls, and done
other household work, she pushed the wooden bolt of the house door,
went into the inner room, and began ringing the bells of the little
church. She lighted two candles that stood on the altar, and then she
made a prayer, and one more moving have I never heard. She knelt
before the church, held out her hands, and murmured: "By the most
sacred wound of Thy right hand, O my crucified Saviour, save my parents
if they be still in torment. Though they have lain for half a century
in the earth I can still hear my father in the dead of night crying out
for help.--By the most sacred wound of Thy left hand I commend to Thee
the soul of my daughter. She had hardly looked round upon the world and
she was just going to lay her little one in her husband's arms, when up
comes cruel Death and takes and buries her out of our sight!--By the
most sacred wound of Thy right foot, I pray Thee from my very heart for
my husband, and for my kindred and benefactors, and that Thou wilt not
forget this little lad from the forest farm.--By the most sacred wound
of Thy left foot, O crucified Saviour, in love and mercy remember also
all my enemies, who have smitten me with their hands and trodden me
with their feet. Blinded men crucified Thee to death, and yet Thou hast
forgiven them.--By the most holy wound of Thy sacred side, I invoke
Thee a thousand and a thousand times.--O crucified God, take up my
grandchild to Thy Divine Heart. His father is far away with the
soldiers, and perhaps I have not long to live. Be Thou a guardian to
the child, I beseech Thee."

That was how she prayed. The little red candles burned devoutly. At
that moment it seemed to me that if I were Our Lord I would come down
from Heaven and take the child in my arms, and say, "See for yourself,
Frau Drachenbinder, I am holding him close to My heart, and I will be
his guardian." I would let him grow white wings, so that he could fly
away to the Better Land.

But then, I wasn't Our Lord.

Presently Frau Drachenbinder said, "Now let's get to the writing." But
when we wanted to begin there was no ink and no pen and no paper. We
had forgotten every one of these things.

The old woman leant her head on her palm, murmuring, "What a
misfortune!"

I had heard somewhere the story of the doctor who in default of the
necessary things wrote his prescription on the door of the room with
chalk. His example was worth following now; but there was no chalk to
be found in the house. I didn't know what else to suggest, and was
unspeakably ashamed of being a scribe without a pen.

"My boy," said the woman suddenly, "maybe you learned to write with
charcoal too?"

Yes, yes--with the charcoal--just like that on the hearth there; that
would do!

"And this, in God's name, must be my writing-paper," she went on, and
lifted the lid of an old coffer standing near the stove. Inside the
coffer I could see cuttings of cloth, a piece of linen, and a rusty
spade. When she saw me looking at the spade, she looked sadly confused,
covered her old face with her brown apron, muttering, "It's a real
disgrace!"

I was stricken, for I took this to be a reproach for my having no
writing things about me.

"I expect you'll be making fun of me," she said. "But don't you go and
think badly of me--I can't do more than I do, I really couldn't do a
thing more--I'm a fairly worn-out old body!"

Then I thought I understood: the poor old woman felt herself disgraced
because she could no longer handle the spade, and it had therefore gone
rusty. I looked about on the hearth for a bit of soft charcoal. The
pine-tree was obliging, and lent me the pen wherewith to write out Frau
Drachenbinder's will, or whatever it might prove to be.

Just when the grey coffer was opened and I standing there ready to take
down her words, that they might deliver their message to her grandchild
in the years to come, the old woman beside me uttered a loud cry. She
turned away quickly, crowed again, and then broke into hoarse laughter.

In terror I broke the charcoal in my fingers and glanced askance at the
door.

When she had done laughing, she grew quiet, drew a deep breath, wiped
the sweat from her face, and turning again to me, said, "Write this--it
won't come to much altogether--still, you'd best begin up in the top
corner, there."

I placed my hand on the topmost corner of the lid. Then the woman spoke
as follows:

"One and one is God alone.--That, child of my child, is thy very own."

I wrote this on the wood.

    "Two and two," she went on, "Two and two is man and wife.
    Three and three the child of their life.
    Four and five to eight and nine--
    For griefs are countless, darling mine.
    Pray as if thou hadst no hand,
    Work as if thou knewest no God,
    Carry fuel, and think the while,
    God will cook the broth for me."

When I had written these things, Frau Drachenbinder let down the coffer
lid, bolted it carefully, and said, "You've done me a great
service--and there's a great stone lifted off my heart. That coffer
there is my legacy to my grandchild.--And now you must tell me what I
owe you for this."

I shook my head. I wouldn't ask for anything, not anything at all.

"What--learn to write so finely and then come all this long way and
suffer cold the long night through and then in the end take nothing for
it--that would be fine indeed!" she cried. "Why, my boy, I couldn't
allow it!"

I glanced through the open door into the next room where the little
church stood. It certainly would be heavenly company for my little bed
at home. She guessed at once. "You're thinking of my little
house-altar!" she said. "Then, in God's name, you shall have it. I
can't shut it up in the chest--my dear little church--and the people
would only steal it from me when I'm gone. With you it will be
respected, I know, and you'll think of old Frau Drachenbinder in sacred
moments, when you're saying your prayers."

And she gave me the little church as it stood. And that was the
greatest bliss of all my childhood.

I dearly wanted to take it on my shoulders at once and carry it away
over the hills to my home. But she said, "You dear little goose, that's
impossible. When the man's back, he'll contrive something for you."

And sure enough, when the man was back again and had eaten the midday
meal with us, he knew what to do. He bound the little church on to my
back with a string, then stooped down in front of the wood block, and
said, "Now, boy, mount again!" So for the second time I got up on his
back, thrust my feet in his breeches pockets, and clung with my hands
round his neck. The old woman held the waking child so that it might
put out its little hand to me, uttered more thanks, and then dived
behind the stove and crowed as before.

I rode away from the place, and with every movement the saints in the
church kept tapping behind my back and the bells in the towers kept
tinkling.

When the man had climbed with me as far as the heights of the
Bürstling, and there again bound the snow-shoes fast to his feet, I
asked him why Frau Drachenbinder was continually screaming for joy and
laughing.

"That's not screaming nor yet laughing neither," said my horse; "Frau
Drachenbinder has a lot of suffering to bear. For some years she used
to have a sort of catch in the breath--such as you may get through a
chill or the like: she didn't take any notice of it, let it just go its
own way, and so, little by little, the barber says, that cramp-crowing
and cramp-laughing came on. Her inside just twists itself up together,
and when she gets excited the fits come on strong. She can hardly touch
any food, and she's face to face with death all the time."

I said nothing. I looked up at the snow-white heights, at the twilight
forests, and saw we were gradually climbing down towards my home in the
clear Sunday afternoon. I was thinking about the little church I had
got as a legacy--how I would set it up in the living-room and hold a
service in it, and how my father and mother would now no longer have to
trudge all that long way to the parish church.

My good horse trotted patiently on, and behind me all the way the
little bells in the towers kept on chiming. What were they saying?...

Old Frau Drachenbinder died soon after that.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] With these small torches the peasants light their rooms.




V

How Little Maxel's House was Burned Down


How well I remember that night!

A dull report, as if the trap-door of the hay-loft had slammed to, woke
me up. And then someone rapped on the window and called into the
living-room: whoever wanted to see little Maxel's house burning must
get up and go and look.

My father sprang out of bed; I began to cry, and immediately thought
about rescuing my rabbit. When other people lost their heads in moments
of emergency it was always blind Julia, our old servant, who calmed us
down again. So now, too, she remarked it wasn't our house that was
burning, but little Maxel's, and that was half an hour away; that it
was not even certain that little Maxel's house was burning; that a wag,
passing by, had thrown the lie in through the window; and that quite
possibly no one _had_ done so at all, but it had only happened to us in
a dream.

Meanwhile she pulled on my breeches and shoes, and we hurried out of
the house to look.

"Oh dear! oh dear!" cried my father. "It's all gone already!"

Over the Waldrücken, which stretches like a wide-bowed saddle across
our part of the country, dividing it into Highlands and Lowlands, the
flame streamed steady and clear toward us. No hissing nor crackling
was to be heard; the beautiful new house, only finished a few weeks
before, was burning like oil. The air was damp, the stars were hidden;
now and again there was a growl of thunder, but the storm was drawing
gently away in the direction of Berkfeld and Weitz.

The lightning--so the man who had wakened us now said--had been darting
hither and thither, had described a great cross in the sky, and then
descended. The fiery point at its lower end had never died out, but had
grown rapidly larger, and then he--the man--had thought to himself,
"There now, it's gone and struck little Maxel's!"

"We must go and see if we can't do something to help," said my father.

"Help, would you?" rejoined the other. "Where the thunderbolt falls,
_I_ shan't meddle! Man mustn't work against his Maker, and if He casts
fire upon a house He certainly intends that house to burn. Besides, you
know, anything struck by lightning can't be quenched!"

"Nor your idiocy neither!" cried my father; and then, angry as I had
seldom seen him, he shouted in his face, "You've been struck silly!"

He left him standing there, and took me by the hand and quickly away.
We descended into the Engtal and went along by the Fresenbach, where we
could see the fire no longer, only the fiery clouds. My father carried
a two-handled pail, and I advised him to fill it at the Fresen. My
father didn't listen, but said several times to himself, "Maxel--to
think of that happening to Maxel!"

I knew little Maxel quite well. He was an active, cheery little chap,
somewhere in the forties; his face was full of pock-marks, and his
hands were brown and rough as the bark of the forest trees. So long as
I could remember he had been a woodcutter in Waldbach.

"If it was anyone else's house that was burning down," said my father,
"well--it would just be his house burning down!"

"Isn't it the same with little Maxel?" I asked.

"With him it's his all that's being burnt: everything that he had
yesterday, and has to-day, and might have had to-morrow."

"D'you mean the lightning has struck Maxel himself?"

"It were better so, boy! I don't grudge him his life--God knows I don't
grudge it him--but if he might have confessed first, and not been in
any mortal sin, I could say downright it were best for him if the
lightning had struck him too."

"Then he would be already up there in Heaven," I remarked.

"Here, don't go paddling about in that wet grass. Keep close behind me
and catch on by my coat-tail. About Maxel--I'll tell you something
about him."

The path sloped gently upwards. My father said, "It must be about
thirty years since Maxel came. Poor people's child. At first he went
out as herdboy among the peasants; later, when he'd grown up a bit, he
went in for the woodcutting--a thorough workman, and always industrious
and thrifty. When he became foreman, he asked the landlord to allow him
to clear the Sour Meadow on the Gfarerhöhe and keep it for life,
because he was so mighty set upon having his own little bit of land.
This was willingly granted, and so, every day, when his woodcutting
hours were over, Maxel was up there on the Sour Meadow, cutting away
the undergrowth and trenching it, and grubbing up stones and burning
the roots of the weeds; and in two years the whole place was drained;
and there's good grass growing there, and he's even sown a little patch
of rye. When he'd got on so far that he had tried it with cabbage and
seen how much the hares relished it, he set about getting some timber.
They couldn't give him that, like the Sour Meadow--he must purchase it
with labour. So he let his wages stand, and he felled the trees and
hewed them square and cut them up for building timber, and all that in
the free time when the other workmen were long since lying on their
stomachs smoking their pipes! And the next thing was he began to get
some of the other woodcutters to help him at such work as a man
couldn't do single-handed, and this way he built his house on the Sour
Meadow. Five years he laboured at it, but there--you've seen for
yourself how it stood there with the golden-red walls, with the clear
windows, and the decoration all round the roof--something grand to see!
There's quite a fine little property been made of the Sour Meadow; and
how long ago was it that our pastor in the catechism class held little
Maxel up as an example of energy and industry? Next month he was
meaning to get married: and to think he's risen from being a poor
pauper lad to the brave householder and house-father!--Take off your
cap to him, boy--And now suddenly there's an end of everything; all the
industry and toil of years has gone for nothing; Maxel stands again
to-day on the same spot as he did at the very beginning."

At that time I derived all my piety from the Bible, and so I met my
father's story with: "Our Heavenly Father has punished Maxel because he
was set upon earthly things like the heathen, and has probably taken
too little thought for Eternity. Look at the birds of the air, they sow
not, neither do they reap----"

"Hold your tongue!" interrupted my father angrily. "The man who said
that was King Solomon--it's easy enough for _him_ to say it: only let
some of our sort try it! I wouldn't be sure of myself; if it happened
to me like little Maxel, I should just lose all heart--I'd just turn
idle and good for nothing. Why, if a man puts a match to a thatched
roof he's put in prison, and quite right too--he doesn't deserve
anything better. But when Someone throws fire down out of Heaven on a
brand-new house that a poor, plucky working-man has built----"

He stopped himself. We were now upon the height, and in front of us
blazed the homestead of little Maxel. The house was just falling in.
Several people were there with axes and pails, but there was nothing to
be done but just stand and look on as the last charred bits tumbled
into ruins. The fire wasn't raging, it didn't roar nor crackle, it
didn't flicker wildly in the air: the whole house was just one flame
rising, hot and steady, towards the Heaven whence it had come.

A little way off from the conflagration lay the stone-heap where Maxel
had carried the stones from the Sour Meadow. Thereon he was now
sitting, the little brown, pock-marked man, and looking at the furnace,
the heat of which was streaming towards him. He was half clad, had
thrown his black Sunday coat, the only thing he had rescued, over him.
The neighbours were holding a little aloof. My father greatly desired
to utter a word of sympathy and comfort, but somehow he too didn't
venture to go near him. Maxel went on sitting there in a way that made
us think every moment, now, _now_ he would leap up and utter some
fearful curse against Heaven, and then throw himself into the flames!

And at last, when the fire was only licking the ground and the bare
wall of the hearth was staring out of the ashes, Maxel got up. He
walked over to the glowing mass, picked up an ember, and lighted his
pipe with it.

I was still very small at that time and didn't think much. But this I
remember: when I saw little Maxel in that dawn-twilight standing before
the burnt ruin of his home, sucking the blue smoke from his pipe and
blowing it away from him, my heart grew suddenly hot within me. As if I
felt how mighty man is, how much greater than his fate, and how there
was no finer scorning of it than calmly blowing tobacco-smoke in its
face.

And when the pipe was well alight, he sat down again on the stone-heap
and gazed away into the distance. You would like to know what he was
thinking? So should I.

Later, little Maxel went rummaging among the ashes of his house, and
drew from them his great wood-axe, and made it sharp again on a
grindstone of the neighbourhood and set to work again. Since then many
years have passed, and to-day on the Sour Meadow there lie beautiful
fields, and on the place of the burnt-out farm a new one has arisen. It
is lively with young folk, and the house-father, little Maxel, teaches
his sons to work--but also allows them to smoke. Not too much, but just
a pipe in due season.




VI

Three Hundred and Sixty-four Nights and a Night


The white kid was gone.

But my father still had four big nanny-goats in the stable, just as he
had four children, who always stood in close relationship to the goats.
Each of the goats had her own little manger, out of which she ate hay
or clover while we milked her. Not one of them would give milk at an
empty manger. The goats were called Zitzerl, Zutzerl, Zeitzerl and
Heitzerl, and were the property of us children--a welcome present which
father had made us. Zitzerl and Zutzerl belonged to my two little
sisters; Zeitzerl to my eight-year-old brother Jakoberle; Heitzerl was
mine!

Each of us faithfully tended and looked after his allotted charge; but
we put all the milk together in a pot, mother boiled it, father gave us
the slices of bread that went with it--and the Lord God blessed the
spoonful of soup for us.

And, when we had ladled up our suppers with our broad wooden spoons,
which had been carved by our uncle and which, because of their size,
would hardly go into our mouths in the first place or out of them in
the second, we would each of us take our horsehair pillow and lie down,
one and all, in the goats' mangers. These were our beds for a time; and
the beloved animals used to fan our cheeks with their soft beards and
lick our little noses with their tongues.

But, when we lay thus in our cribs, we did not always go to sleep at
the very first lick. My head was crammed with a multitude of wonderful
stories and fairy-tales of our grandfathers. I would tell these stories
in those evening-hours; and my brothers and sisters revelled in them
and even the goats were fond of listening to them too. Only now and
again, when the thing struck them as too incredible, they would give a
little bleat to themselves or bang at the mangers impatiently with
their horns. Once, when I was telling of the corn-wraith who blackens
the oats when she cries at midnight in the fields, and eats nothing but
the grey beards of old charcoal burners, my Heitzerl began to bleat so
violently that the other three joined in until at last my brother and
sisters burst into wild peals of laughter and I was shamefully obliged
to hold my tongue like a convicted boaster.

For a long time after that, I told my sleeping-companions no more
stories and I resolved never to speak another word to Heitzerl so long
as I lived.

Then came Ascension Day, on which day mother made us the usual
egg-cake, my favourite dish in all the world. That year, however, the
hawks had taken our best laying-hens; the egg-basket would not fill;
and, when the cake appeared on Ascension Day, it was only a tiny little
loaf. I gave a woe-begone look at the wooden dish.

My little five-year-old sister peeped up at me; and, as though noticing
my longing, she suddenly cried:

"I say, Peterle, look here! If you will tell us a short story every
night for a whole year long, I will give you my share of the cake."

Strange to say, the others all chimed in and echoed this noble
renunciation on the little one's part; they clapped their hands; and--I
entered into the bargain. So, suddenly, had I attained the object of my
desire.

I tucked my cake under my jacket and went with it to the dairy, where
no one could see or disturb me. I bolted the door, sat down on an
overturned tub and allowed my ten fingers and the well-ordered host of
my teeth to work their will on the poor cake.

But now came this anxiety. There could not be a doubt that my brother
and sisters would insist strictly on their due. When I went
out a-herding, I begged a story of every pitch-maker, every
charcoal-burner, every keeper and every knowing little woman that I met
in the wood and on the fields. They were productive sources, and I was
able to meet my liabilities every evening. Meanwhile, of course, it was
a daily misery until I hit upon something fresh; and, after a time, it
happened not seldom that little sister would interrupt me and call out
from her manger:

"Look here, we know that one! You have told it us before!"

I could see that I must think of new ways and I therefore struggled to
improve my reading, so as to draw treasures from the many story-books
which lay idling on the sooty shelves in our little house in the
forest. Now I had new sources: the story of the Countess-palatine
(Jakoberle always said, "The Countess-Gelatine") Genovefa; the four
sons of Aymon; the Fair Melusina; Wendelin von Höllenstein: wonderful
things by the dozen. And my brother would often say from his manger:

"I don't mind going without my cake a bit! This is just _too_ lovely.
What do you say, Zeitzerl?"

Now the evenings grew too short; and I had to tell some of these
stories in serials and sequels, a proceeding to which little sister
refused point-blank to agree, for she stuck to it that a _whole_ story
every night was what we bargained for.

So the year went by. Little by little, I acquired a real skill in
telling stories and even told them in High German, as they stood
printed in the books! And it often happened that, during the telling,
my listeners buried themselves in their coverlets and began to groan
with fright at the stories of robbers and ghosts; but I was not allowed
to stop, for all that!

Ascension Day was very nearly there again, and with it, the completion
of my bargain. But--it was like my luck!--just before the last evening,
my thread gave out entirely. All my recollections, all the books which
I could get hold of, all the little men and women whom I met were
exhausted, drained, pumped dry beyond all hope. I implored my brother
and sisters:

"To-morrow is the last evening; make me a present of it!"

There was a general outcry:

"No, no, no presents! You got your Ascension cake!"

Even the goats bleated their approval.

The next day, I went about like a lost sheep. Then the thought suddenly
came to me: "Deceive them! _Invent_ something!"

But my conscience at once stepped in and cried aloud:

"What you tell must be real! You really had the cake!"

Nevertheless, an event occurred in the course of that day which made me
hope that, in the heat of the excitement, it would release me from my
duty.

My brother Jakoberle lost his Zeitzerl. He went this way and that over
the heath, he went into the wood and, crying and calling, hunted for
the goat. But, at last, he brought her home, late in the evening. We
ate our porridge quietly and went to our cribs; and a story was
expected of me.

All was silent. The listeners waited eagerly. The goats clashed their
teeth together as they chewed the cud.

"Very well, they shall have their story," said I.

I reflected. I began:

"There was once a great, great wood. And everything in the wood was
dark. No little birds sang: only the screech-owl's cry was heard. But,
even though the other birds had sung, all the boughs and all the
leaves on the trees wept thousands and thousands of tears. In the
middle of this wood is a heath, silent as the graveyard; and he who
goes over it and does not turn back is never seen again. Once upon a
time, two knees went over this heath; and inside those knees was
blood."

"Jesus Mar...!" gasped the elder of my little sisters; and all three
crept under their coverlets.

"Yes, two knees with blood inside them," I continued, "and they passed
over the heath towards the dark wood, like a lost soul. But, all at
once, the two bloody knees...."

"I say, I'll give you my blue trouser-belt if you stop!" whimpered my
brother in his fear and hid still deeper in the coverlet.

"The two bloody knees stopped," I continued, "and on the ground lay a
stone as white as a winding-sheet. Then two flickering lights appeared
between the trees; and thereupon four more knees, _all with
blood_--hovered to the same place...."

"I'll give you my new pair of shoes if you stop!" Jakoberle panted in
his trough and, for sheer terror, drew Zeitzerl to him by her beard.

"And so they all six together passed through the dark wood and out upon
the heath and over the oat-field to our house ... and here into the
stable...."

Now they all three cried out and whimpered; and there was no end to
their terror, and my little sister timidly promised me her share of
to-morrow's Ascension cake, which was expected this year too, if I
would only stop. But I went on:

"Well, ah, yes, I forgot to begin by saying that the first two
knees--with blood--belonged to our Jakoberle and the last four to his
Zeitzerl ... as they went about in the wood to-day."

Suddenly, they all burst out laughing.

"Why, everybody has two knees with blood in them!" cried little
sister; and the goats bleated their share of the jubilation.

I had played my part right out. For three hundred and sixty-four nights
long, I had shone as a wise and veracious story-teller; the
three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth had unmasked me as a deceitful humbug.
The promise of the second Ascension cake was withdrawn; little sister
declared that her offer had been made in self-defence.

And I had shattered the confidence of my public for good and all; and,
thereafter, whenever it wanted to express its doubts of anything I
related, it cried, with one voice:

"Ah, that's only one of your old knees again!"




VII

How the White Kid Died


There was yet another time when I just escaped the birch.

My father had a snow-white kid, my Cousin Jok had a snow-white head.
The kid loved chewing stalks and twigs; my cousin loved chewing a short
pipe. We--I and my younger brother and sisters--were ever so fond of
the kid and of Cousin Jok too. And so we lighted upon the idea of
bringing the kid and our cousin together.

One bright, sunny day in July, I took my brother and my two sisters out
into the cabbage-patch and there put this question to them:

"Which of you has a hat without a hole in it?"

They examined their hats and caps, but the sun shone through all of
them, making little flecks of light in the shadow on the ground. Only
Jakoberle's hat was without a flaw; so I took it in my hand and said:

"Cousin's called Jok and to-morrow is St. Jokopi's[7] Day. Now what
shall we give him for a present on his name-day? Why not the white
kid?"

"The white kid belongs to father!" cried little sister Plonele, shocked
at this arbitrary suggestion.

"That's just why I am sending the hat round," said I. "You, Jakoberle,
sold your rabbit to Sepp, the Knierutscher, yesterday; you, Plonele,
have had three groschen as a tip from your god-father; you, Mirzerle,
got a present from father two days ago. Look, I'll put in the five
kreuzer which I've saved up; and we must manage to buy the kid from
father between us. And then we'll give it to cousin to-morrow. Now here
goes for the collection!"

They looked into the hat for a moment and then began to feel in their
pockets. Then Plonele said, "Mother's got my money!" And Mirzerle
cried, in alarm, "I don't know wherever mine's got to!" And Jakoberle
stared at the ground and muttered, "There must be a hole in my pocket!"

And so my plan fell to pieces.

None the less, we petted and fondled the snow-white kid. It stood up
and put its fore-feet on our knees and looked at us roguishly with its
squinny eyes, as though it were mocking us for not being rich enough to
buy it between the lot of us. It tittered and bleated at us like
anything and showed us its snow-white teeth. It was hardly three months
old and already had a beard; while I and Jakoberle were seven years old
and more and had to make ourselves a beard of grey tree-moss when we
wanted one. And the kid ate even that off our faces!

In spite of that, each one of us was much fonder of the little
four-footed creature than of all the others put together! And so I cast
about for some other means of rejoicing my cousin with the gift of the
animal.

When father came home from the fields that afternoon, we all swarmed
about him and tugged at his clothes.

"Father," I asked, "is it true that 'The early morn has gold in its
mouth'?"

This being one of his own proverbs, he answered promptly:

"Indeed it _is_ true."

"Father!" the four of us immediately cried together. "How early must we
get up every day for you to give us the white kid?"

Father did not seem to jump at this business view of the matter. But,
when he heard of our proposal to give the kid to Cousin Jok, he
bargained that we should get up half an hour earlier every morning and
thereupon made the dear little beast over to us.

The kid was ours. We resolved with one accord to creep out of bed next
morning before cousin's time for getting up--and that was saying a
great deal--to tie a red ribbon round the kid's neck and to take it to
old Jok's bedside before he thrust his body into his long grey fur,
which he wore winter and summer alike.

This was our sacred intention.

But, next day, when mother called us and we opened our eyelids, the sun
shone so fiercely into our eyes that we had to shut them again until
she covered the window with her kerchief.

Now there was no excuse left. But cousin had gone out long before,
taking his fur with him. He had driven the sheep and goats to the
meadow in the valley where he always tended them and where he sat all
day smiling and chewing his pipe. And the little animals nibbled busily
at the dewy grasses and shrubs and skipped and gambolled merrily on the
sunny meadow.

The little kid was among them. And had nobody reminded Jok that this
was his name-day?

       *       *       *       *       *

At the time of which I speak, lucifer-matches had not yet been invented
and so the beloved fire was a precious thing. You could not carry it in
your pocket as easily as to-day, without burning your trousers. It had
to be knocked out of stones with hard blows; no sooner hatched, it must
be fed with tinder, and it was long ere it derived strength enough from
this to peck at coarser food and then become fledged. On every separate
occasion, fire had to be formally brought into the service of man.

It was a toilsome and ticklish piece of work; my own mother, who was
usually so gentle, could get quite cross over it.

The glowing embers, however carefully preserved overnight in the
hearth, were generally dead by morning. Whatever pains mother might
take to blow up the sparks in the ashes, it was all in vain: the fire
had died during the night. And then the striking with flint and steel
began, and we children were often quite hungry before mother produced
the fire that was to cook the morning-porridge.

So it was on the morning of cousin's name-day. We had heard the
bellows-blowing and fire-striking for some time out in the kitchen.
Then our mother suddenly exclaimed:

"It's no good at all! One would think the devil had spat on the hearth!
And the flint hasn't a spark of fire left in it, and the tinder's damp,
and here's everybody waiting for their porridge!"

Then she came into the room and said:

"Come, Peterle, quick, and run across as fast as you can to the
Knierutscher woman. Tell her that I beg her to send me a handful of
embers from her hearth. And take her that loaf of bread over there for
her kindness. Hurry up, Peterle, so that we can get our porridge
quickly."

I had my little white linen breeches on in no time and, as I was,
barefoot and bareheaded, I took the heavy round loaf under my arm and
ran off to the Knierutschers' house.

"You old sunshine!" I said, as I went. "You ought to be ashamed of
yourself, that you can't even warm a mouthful of porridge, and here
I've got to go running to the Knierutscher woman for fire--But just you
wait: things will soon be bright and jolly on our hearth--the flames
will leap over the sticks, the walls will light up red, the pots will
bubble, the smoke will rush out of the hearth and the chimney and hide
you from sight! And quite right too, for then we shall eat our
porridge and our stew in the shadow, and the pancake, too, that's to be
fried to-day for Cousin Jok, and you shall see nothing of all these
nice things!"

As I went down the hill after my lecture to the sun, I had a happy
thought. My loaf was as round as a ball and as hard as if it had been
turned out of larch-wood. In my part of the country, they let bread
grow stale, because it makes it last twice as long; even though it has
occasionally to be smashed up, at mealtimes, with a sledge-hammer.

Well, seeing that my loaf was so round that there was nothing rounder
on the face of the earth, I let it run loose down the slope, raced
nimbly after it and caught it up again.

That was a thoroughly jolly game; and I should have liked to call all
my brothers and sisters to see it and share in it. But, as I was
jumping up and down the slope in my delight, my loaf suddenly played me
a trick and darted like the wind between my legs. Hurrying and hopping
away it went, fleeter than a roe before the hounds--it bounded down the
hill, leapt far over the edge into the valley below and vanished from
my sight.

I stood there like a block, feeling as if I should drop with fright and
go rolling into the valley in my turn. I went to and fro and up and
down for a while; and, then as I could nowhere see the loaf, I slunk
with hanging head into the Knierutschers' house.

There was a fine big fire burning on the hearth.

"What have you come for, Peterle?" asked Frau Knierutscher, kindly.

"Our fire's gone out," I stammered, "we can't cook a thing and so my
mother sent me to ask for a handful of embers and she will return them
very soon."

"You little silly, you! Who ever heard of returning a few embers?"
cried she, as she took the tongs and raked some into an old pot. "Here,
tell your mother to make up a good fire and cook you a nice stew. But
take care, Peterle, don't you let the wind get at them, or it will blow
the sparks up to the roof. There, go now, in God's name!"

So gentle was she with me, who had so lightly played away her loaf! It
weighs upon my conscience to this day.

When, at last, I got back to the house with my pot of fire, I was
greatly surprised to see blue smoke rising out of the chimney.

"You're one to send to fetch death and not fire!" cried mother, as I
entered.

And she busied herself about the fire crackling in the hearth and did
not so much as look at me.

My coals were now hardly flickering and looked wretched beside that
fire. I put the pot down sadly in a corner of the hearth and slunk
away. I had been gone much too long; then, by good fortune, Cousin Jok
had come home from the meadow, and he had a burning-glass, which he
held over a piece of tinder in the sun until it caught. And so the sun
which I had slandered had stolen a march upon me and provided fire for
the porridge before I did. I was heartily ashamed of myself and, to
this day, am unable to look the benefactor straight in the face.

       *       *       *       *       *

I slunk into the paddock. There I saw Cousin Jok squatting in his long
grey, red-embroidered fur, with his white head. And, when I drew nigh,
I saw why he was squatting here like that. The snow-white kid lay in
front of him, with its head and its feet outstretched and Cousin Jok
was stripping off its hide.

At that I burst into loud weeping. Cousin Jok stood up, took me by the
hand, and said:

"There it lies and looks at you!"

And the kid really was staring into my face with its glassy eyes. And
yet it was dead.

"Peterle!" whispered my cousin, gravely. "Mother sent the Knierutscher
woman a loaf of bread."

"Yes," I sobbed, "and it ran away from me, right down over the edge."

"Since you own up, laddie," said Cousin Jok, "I will arrange things so
that nothing happens to you. I have told mother that a stone or
something came rolling down and killed the kid. (Somehow, I thought in
my own mind that Peterle was at the back of it!) That loaf of bread
came straight out of the air, down over the high edge, passed me and
hit the kid right on the head. The poor little thing staggered and fell
and was dead as a mouse at once. However, don't be afraid, we'll keep
to the stone idea. I'll make things all right with the Knierutscher
woman too; and now be quiet, laddie, and don't pull such dismal faces.
To-night we'll eat the poor beastie, and mother will cook us a
horseradish-soup to go with it."

In such wise died the little white kid. My brother and sisters told me
it had been killed by a naughty, cruel stone.

To please me, mother added my coals to the fire on the hearth, and
before this fire the kid was roasted. It was to have been a gift for
Cousin Jok; and now he was to have roast kid instead. But he invited
all of us to join him and gave us the best bits. I did not relish mine
at all.

The next morning, Jakoberle armed himself with a cudgel, followed
Cousin Jok with it into the lower meadow and wanted to see the stone
that killed the little kid.

"Child," said Cousin Jok, chewing hard at his pipe, "it rolled further
on and the water's running over it now: it's down in the glen."

The dear, good old man! The stone that killed the little kid was lying
on my heart.

FOOTNOTE:

[7] Jacob, Jacobus. The feast of St. James the Apostle is celebrated
on the 25th of July.--_Translator's Note._




VIII

Children of the World in the Forest


Far more intelligent must he be, the peasant of the isolated mountain
farm, far more versatile and capable than the villager, and infinitely
more so than the townsman--_must_, or he could not exist!

The townsman has an easy time of it: if he can write, or keep accounts;
if, for instance, he has the knack of making leather, or keeps a
grocer's shop; or even if he speculates and applies himself to cutting
off his coupons, he has all that he requires; and all that a townsman
requires everyone who is a townsman knows.

The things which, in the towns, are produced by the divided toil of
thousands of heads, hands, and wheels, in other words, the necessaries
of life, the peasant in the far-lying mountains must make for himself,
in his narrow circle, with his small, unaided means. He is a provider
of natural produce, manufacturer, middleman and consumer, all in one.
The bread which he eats comes from the corn which he flung into the
earth last year with his own hand; the bacon which he enjoys on its bed
of cabbage is cut from the pig fattened with the turnips which he has
planted in his own ground. The shoe which he wears is made of the
cow-hide which he himself has stripped from the animal's body and
himself has tanned; the wool that forms his coat he has shorn from his
own sheep, spun, woven and milled. The shirt on his back he saw last
summer shimmering in the sunny fields in the blue flax-blossom; and the
milking-pail into which his cow sends her milk streaming was, but a
year ago, hiding in a fir-trunk in his woods. And I could in like
manner string out a long list of matters in which the farmer must be
his own breeder, gardener, miller, baker, smith, saddler, carpenter,
weaver, wheelwright and so on. And a household in which one and all of
these trades are put in practice need not even be a very large one: it
is the ordinary farmhouse in the mountain valleys to which the world of
exchange and barter has not yet fully made its way.

Isn't it true, then, that such a peasant-farmer needs to have a head on
his shoulders? This head, again, is of home production, and a good
thing too; for the Jew pedlar, who is always prepared to bring any
requisite from town for cash, could hardly be expected to supply that.

But nowadays this, like most things, is changing; and, since gold and
silver have taken to rolling to and fro, in such a momentous fashion,
between the houses of town and country, the peasant no longer has the
same joy in his farm, where he must always be labouring for others.
Besides, he need not work out in the wilderness nowadays; he can do
much better, they tell him, on rented land or in the factories; he
sells or lets his property and goes after money. And there at last you
have the stupid peasant!

I only speak of these things because my father's house, concerning
which I have something to tell, was one of those farms in which we
ourselves produced nearly everything that we wanted. And yet, even at
that time, money played us a trick. My father was particularly clever
at tanning hides, at weaving, at grinding corn and at pressing
linseed-oil. In the last case, I assisted him to brave purpose, as a
boy of ten, by dipping a slice of white bread into the oil that ran
from the gutter of the press and then transferring the bright yellow
slice to my mouth.

One day, while we were thus engaged, Clements, the timber-merchant,
walked into the pressing-room. He had once been forest-ranger at Alpel;
but he had made such a huge amount of money in the timber-trade that he
lost all interest in our mountains and went down into the broad
Mürzthal, where he displayed a restless activity in acquiring more and
yet more money. He had grown quite lean at this unedifying occupation;
but otherwise he continued in fairly good fettle.

Well, when Clements saw the oil bubbling in the wooden pail, he asked,
was the cider sweet?

My father invited him to taste it; but, when Clements lifted the pail
bodily and took a draught from it, he fell back as though someone had
struck him in the face and lost no time in spitting out what he had
swallowed.

"It can't hurt you," said my father, to console him. "It is pure
linseed oil."

"Forest-farmer," said Clements, gradually recovering himself, "here I
am, bringing all sorts of good things to your house; and this is the
way you treat me!"

"You're the first I ever met that did not like flax-wine," replied my
father. "It's just like a wine, so golden and clear. And you couldn't
find anything better for one's precious health. I am in the doctor's
debt to the price of a couple of oxen; and even then I should be under
the sod to-day if Our Father in Heaven had not made linseed-oil to
grow."

"And, as you, forest-farmer, are still, thank God, above the sod,"
drawled Clements, "you'll be needing money, I'm thinking. Look, it's
your guardian angel's brought me here: I'm bringing you some."

"Oh, my gracious!" replied my father, leaning his whole weight upon the
lever, so that the oil-cake in the press had to yield its last drains,
which, however, were received into a separate little pot, for these
dregs are not quite so clear and mild as the first stream. "Oh, my
gracious!" said he. "I could do with the money well enough; but you
can just take it away again: I know what you want for it. You want the
six old fir-trees that stand outside my house. Things are a sight worse
with me than they were a year ago, when you came and asked to buy the
trees, but I have no other answer for you than I gave you then: the six
trees outside the house are a memory of the old days; and, if I had to
sell field and meadow and the cattle in the stable, those trees shall
stay where they are; and, if they have to lay me in the grave without a
coffin, those old trees shall stay where they are until God's lightning
cracks them or the storm fells them."

The last words were spoken with violence; and, with that, the last drop
of oil left the press.

But Clements said:

"Forest-farmer, you shall not sell a field, nor a head of cattle from
your stable; you shall have a coffin of good white ash-wood: God grant
that you may not need it for a long time to come! You shall have good
days yet in this world. You shall not sell the old fir-trees, but you
shall sell the larch in your wood that are fit for felling. Have you
your pocket-book on you? If so, just open it."

I got a fright, when I saw the figure on the bank-note which the
tempter had now drawn from his leather case and which, holding it
between his finger-tips, he sent fluttering to and fro, like a little
flag, before my father's blinking eyes. Misfortune had cleared the way
in our house for the timber-merchant: we were no longer able to get all
we wanted for our ten heads and stomachs out of that eighty yoke of
mountain land; the doctor was sending us letters which I could not read
soft and low enough to make them bearable to my father:

"The forest-farmer is hereby summoned within fourteen days to ...
failing which...."

"As my patience is at last exhausted, I have placed the matter in the
hands of the imperial and royal courts, and if, within eight days ...
execution and distraint...."

Those were more or less the first sentences which I was given to read
in our dear High-German language. And there was a certain book, too,
with its "date of debt" and "date of payment," which gave me an idea of
the force that lies concealed in the language of Schiller and Goethe.

It was a real live "hundred" which the timber-merchant held by the
corner between his two fingers. Did not a chill shudder, at that
moment, go over the tops of the larches that were dotted here and there
in the pine-woods outside, I wonder? Nor any anxious foreboding trouble
the hearts of the little birds that had built their nests there?

My father did not put out his hand for the money, but neither did
he hide it in his pocket; he did not busy it with the lever of
the oil-press; he just kept it, half-open, as nature had bent it,
on his knee, while he sat exhausted with his labour. Clements dropped
the rare bit of paper into it; then the lank fingers closed
softly--instinctively--and held it tight.

The larch were sold.

"I have only one condition to make," said the timber-merchant, when he
saw that the poor small farmer lay duly under the spell of the money.
"I shall have the trees felled late in the autumn, when the snow comes.
You will be astonished, forest-farmer, when I tell you that the emperor
will ride over your larch-trees! Yes, yes, we shall use them for
building the railway. My condition is that my wood-cutters shall be
allowed to cook their meals and sleep in your house as long as they are
working in the woods."

"Why not?" said father. "That'll be all right, if it's good enough for
them under my roof."

What mischief those good-natured words brought down upon our peaceful
forest home!

Clements went away happy and contented, after presenting me with a
bright new groschen for myself. I remember being surprised at this: it
was obviously for us to be contented, seeing that we had the money!
Father took his up to the loft and hid it in the clothes-press: it was
very soon to come out again. Then the days passed, as usual, and the
larch stood in the woods and rocked their long branches in the wind, as
usual, and got ready their twigs for next spring, as usual.

"They don't know how soon they are to die!" my father said to me once,
as we were coming from the meadow through the woods.

But I comforted myself with the hope that Clements the timber-merchant,
who lived out in the merry Mürzthal and never came back to our
neighbourhood at all, would forget all about the larch. My mother, to
whom I confided this view, said sharply:

"Oh, child, that fellow forgets about his soul, but he'll never forget
the larches!"

And, one day, when the earth had frozen hard and the moss cracked and
broke underfoot, we heard the rasping of the saw in the woods. When we
looked across the brown tops of the firs, we saw the yellow spire of a
tall larch-tree soar high above them. The rasping of the saw died away,
the blows of the axe rang out; then slowly the spire bent over, dipped;
and thunder echoed through the forest.

That evening the wood-cutters came to our house. There were only two of
them; and, at first sight, we were all pleased with them. One of them
was already well on in years and had a long red beard, a bald pate and
a sharp, crooked nose. The man's little eyes looked smaller still
because the red eyelashes and eyebrows were hardly visible against the
colour of his skin; but the eyes were full of fun and devilment. The
other was quite twenty years or so younger, had a little brown beard,
but otherwise was rather pale and thin in the face. Anyone, however,
seeing his powerful neck and his broad chest would take him to be much
more of a wood-cutter than the red one, who only looked such a warrior
because of his beard, but, in other respects, was much slighter in
build than the pale one. Both wore stiff leather aprons and smelt of
rosin and shavings.

Our cooking was soon done; so mother left the hearth to them. And, upon
my word, they knew how to make use of it! What they cooked was not the
regular wood-cutter's game, such as stray foxes, sparrows and such-like
dumplings as are prepared with flour and fat, but real meat and bacon
and grill; and it all simmered and frizzled in the pans until our
stomachs, which had to be satisfied with bread-soup and potatoes, were
driven frantic. But the red one tore off a whole piece of bacon for us
to taste. They had a wooden jar with them, wound round with straw, out
of which one and the other took long draughts. The red one invited my
father to try their wine. He did; and his experience was worse than
that of Clements with the linseed-oil: the jar contained that hellish
stuff, brandy.

The wood-cutters now feasted in our house day after day. We children
lost all liking for our daily food, at the sight of luxury and
abundance. We became discontented; and our household, consisting of two
half-grown servant-girls and a half-blind woman, heaved many a deep
sigh. But the red one knew how to amuse us. He talked of towns and
other countries; for the two men had been about a good deal and had
worked in large factories. Then he regaled us with funny stories and
tricks; in the early days also with riddles and droll plays upon words,
at which the maids tittered a good deal, while father and mother sat
silent and I did not rightly know what to make of it all. Then came
songs, in which, to the great delight of our household, country
courtship in all its forms found full expression. When this began, it
was high time for us children to go to bed; but our straw bundles
happened to be in the very room in which these merry things were going
on. True, we closed our eyes, and I really had the firm intention to go
to sleep; but my ears remained open, and the tighter I closed my eyes,
the more I saw in my mind's eye.

The pale wood-cutter was quiet and proper in his behaviour and did not
remain so long in the parlour, but always went betimes to his
sleeping-place, which was outside in the hay-loft. But even the girls
could not follow this decent example: they let the red one go on and
were wholly absorbed in his chattering. My father once observed to the
red fellow that the younger was more serious than the old one,
whereupon the red one asked if the farmer disliked jolly songs: in that
case, he would be pious and pray. And he began to recite comic
sentences in the tone of the Lord's Prayer; got on to the hearth and,
mimicking the preaching of a Capuchin, mocked at the holy apostles,
martyrs, and virgins, until my mother went to my father with uplifted
hands.

"I do beg and beseech you, Lenzel--throw that godless being out of the
door, or I shall have to do it myself!"

"Do it yourself, little woman!" cried the red man and jumped off the
hearthstone and tried to catch hold of mother and fondle her.

This was something unheard of. That this should suddenly happen in our
house, where, year in, year out, no unseemly word was ever spoken! My
father was downright paralysed with astonishment; but my mother seized
the frivolous wood-cutter by the arm and cried:

"Now you get out of this, foul-mouth, and never enter my house again!"

The wood-cutter refused to budge an inch.

"If forest-farmer folk are so pious," he continued, still in his
preaching tone, "as to forget what they have promised our employer, I
shan't leave this roof for all that. Women and wet rags shan't drive me
out."

"Perhaps men and dry logs will!" cried my father. And with a swiftness
and determination which I had never before beheld in this mild-mannered
man, he snatched a log of wood from the stack. The red one made a
furious rush at his arms; and they wrestled. Mother tried to protect
father; my brothers and sisters in their straw set up a cry of murder;
I flew to the door, with nothing on me but my shirt, and called to the
maids, who were already sleeping peacefully in their beds, to come and
help. The blind one was the first to come hobbling safely across the
yard, while one of the two who had the use of their eyes stumbled over
the pigs' trough. And the youngest girl, terrified by my cries and the
uproar in the house, came clattering down the step-ladder that led from
the hay-loft to the yard. Without considering, at the time, the
far-reaching effects of this last incident, I rushed back into the
house, where the two men were engaged in a violent struggle, panting
and groaning and going from one wall of the room to the other. The
wood-cutter's long beard was flung in wild strands around my father's
head; but father seemed to be gaining the upper hand; then came the
younger wood-cutter, clad, it is true, in nothing but his shirt and his
blue drawers, but with the full weight of his body. The women did what
is their office on such occasions: they wrung their hands and wailed.
Only, my mother, when she saw that all was lost, snatched a blazing
fire-brand from the hearth.

"I'll drive you out, you ruffians, that I do know!" she cried and flew,
with the brand, to the wooden inner wall.

"The fury means to set fire to us! And to the house with us!" yelled
the wood-cutters and rushed out at the door, through the curling smoke.

We were rid of the nasty fellows, but the flames were leaping merrily
along the wall. In hot haste, we succeeded--I no longer remember by
what means--in smothering the fire.

That evening--the most terrible in my life--passed into a still and
fearsome night. We had barred and bolted the door of the house; and,
when we put out the rushlight, father took a last look at the window,
to see if they were still outside.

It remained quiet; and not till the next morning did the young
wood-cutter come to fetch his tools and his mate's. Then they built
themselves a hut in the woods out of planks and bark; and here they
lived half through the winter, until they had finished their work on
the larch-trunks.

We felt convinced, however, that they must be plotting some mischief
against us, whereupon the youngest of the maids remarked, with an air
of great wisdom, that it might be best always to keep on good terms
with that kind of people.

"It's easy for you to talk, wench," retorted my father. "What do you
know?"

After that ... she said no more.

I had a fresh fright at that time. Prompted by curiosity to see the
godless fellows once more and to spy out whether the devil, in the
guise of a wood-cutter, was helping them with their work, I peeped one
day from the forest path and through the thicket at their work-place.
Then I saw that they were making coffins.

I announced the fact at home and caused the greatest excitement in
consequence.

"As I said, they have some fresh thing in their minds!" said my mother.

Father suggested:

"Boy, you have been dreaming again, in broad daylight. Still, I will go
and see."

We went into the woods. My father peered through the thicket at the
wood-cutters; and then I saw him turn pale.

"You half-wit!"[8] he said; and then he groaned. "They're burying every
peasant of us at Alpel!"

The coffins were stacked in great piles; and the men were still
chopping and trimming new ones with their axes. We rushed away to
inform the local magistrate, who, at that time, lived on the mountain
on the other side of the Engthal, and tell him what we had seen. On the
road to his house we met Michel the carpenter, to whom my father said
that he had better have all his knives and choppers ready, for it
looked as if we were in for bad times. The strangers who were working
in his wood did nothing but make coffins.

"Yes," said Michel, "I've noticed that too: it's a good thing the
coffins are not hollow!"

And the man of experience told us of the shape of the railway-sleepers,
which were usually cut from the block in pairs, before being sawn
asunder, and which, with their six corners, looked not unlike a coffin.

We turned back then and there, and as we went along the edge of the
field, where the grass was nice and smooth, my father said to me:

"This gives us a good chance of laughing at ourselves, lest others
should. That's the way things go: when we've fallen out with a man, we
put down everything that's bad to him and are as blind as if Satan had
stuck his horns into our eyes. When all is said, even those two
wood-cutters are not so black as they appear to be. Still, I shall be
glad when they have cleared out. And this much I do know: Clements buys
no more larch of me."

"Because you have none left," was my wise comment on that.

Father did not seem to hear.

The wood-cutters went at last and the larch-wood sleepers with them.
The red-brown stumps remained behind; and in their pores stood bright
drops of rosin.

"It shows that they were not Christians," I remember my father saying,
"that they did not cut a cross in a single stump."

For, at that time, it was still the custom, in the forest, for the
wood-cutters to carve a little cross with the axe into each stump as
soon as the tree had fallen. Why, I was never quite able to discover:
it was probably for the same reason that makes the blacksmith give two
taps with his hammer on the anvil, after the red-hot iron is removed.
These things are intended to thwart the devil, who, as everybody knows,
is never idle and interferes in all the works of man.

My father, whose whole life was bound up with the cross, went
afterwards and cut crosses in the larch-stumps. And so things in the
forest were once more in order and peaceful, as they used to be.

And that is the story of the strange wood-cutters, the children of the
world, who had penetrated into our far-away forest-nook like the first
wave of the turbulent sea of the world. How small this wave was and
what an amount of unrest, discontent, and vexation was washed up with
it! Gradually, the strange elements were forgotten: even mother ended
by overcoming her indignation. Only our little serving-maid remained
restless and wistful, even after the wave had flowed back again, and
her eyes were often red with crying.

FOOTNOTE:

[8] _Halbnarr_: half-fool. According to German folk-lore, it is only
the half-idiots who are really dangerous.--_Translator's Note._




IX

How Meisensepp Died


At home we had a book called _The Lives of Jesus Christ, Our Lady, and
of many of God's Saints: a spiritual treasure by Peter Cochem_. It was
an old book, the leaves were grey, and each chapter began with
wonderful big letters in black and red. The wooden cover was worm-eaten
in many places, and a mouse had nibbled away one of the leathern flaps.
Since my grandfather's death there was nobody in our house who could
have read it; no wonder, then, that these creatures had taken
possession of it, and thus gained their bodily sustenance from the
spiritual treasure. Then came I, the little book-worm, chasing the
little beasts out of the book and devouring it myself instead. I read
out of it daily to the members of our household. The younger farm-lads
and girls did not care much for this new custom, for they dared not
joke and yodel during the reading; the older people, however, being
rather more God-fearing, listened devoutly and said, "It's just as if
the parson were preaching; so solemnly done and with such a loud
voice!"

I got quite a reputation as an able reader, and was much sought after.
Whenever anybody in the neighbourhood lay ill or dying, or was even
dead already, and there was watch being kept by the corpse during the
night, my father was asked to let me go and read. On such occasions I
took the weighty book under my arm and set off. It was hard work
carrying it, for at that time I was but a little shrimp of a fellow.

Once, late at night, when I was already asleep in the sweet-scented
hay-loft where I sometimes had my bed in summer-time, I was awakened by
one of our men tugging at my coverlet. "You must get up quickly, Peter,
get up! Meisensepp has sent his daughter, and begs that you'll come and
read to him--he's dying. Get up!"

Of course, I got up, dressed myself hastily, took the book, and went
with the girl from our house up across the heath and through the
forest. Meisensepp's hut stood quite alone in the midst of the forest.

Meisensepp had been gamekeeper and woodward in his younger years;
latterly he occupied himself mostly with sharpening saws for the
wood-cutters. Then suddenly this severe illness overtook him.

While the girl and I were going through the wilderness in the still,
starlit night neither of us spoke a word. Silently we went on together.
Only once she whispered, "Let me have the book, Peter; I'll carry it
for you."

"You couldn't do it," I answered; "you're even smaller than me."

After a two hours' tramp the girl said, "There's the light."

We saw a faint gleam coming from the window of Meisensepp's house.
Going nearer, we met the priest who had administered the Last Sacrament
to the dying man.

"Father, is he going to get well?" asked the girl, fearfully.

"He is not so very old," said the priest. "God's will be done,
children; God's will be done."

And he went on, while we went into the house.

It was small, and, after the manner of forest huts, living-room and
bedroom were all one with the kitchen. On the hearth in an iron holder
a pine-torch was burning which veiled the ceiling in a cloud of smoke.
Near by, on a bundle of straw, two little boys lay sleeping. I knew
them well, for we had often gathered mushrooms and berries together in
the woods and lost our herds while doing it: they were a few years
younger than I. By the wall of the stove sat Sepp's wife, giving the
breast to the baby and looking with wide-open eyes into the flame of
the pine-torch; and behind the stove, on the only bed in the house, lay
the sick man. He was sleeping; his face was wasted, the greyish hair
and the beard round the chin had been cut short, which made the whole
head appear smaller to me than formerly when I had seen Sepp on the way
to church. Through his pale, half-open lips fluttered the broken
breathing.

On our entrance his wife got up gently, made some apology for having
had me disturbed in my sleep, and invited me to sit down and eat what
the priest had left of a dish of eggs which still stood on the table.

And so, seated on the chair that was still warm from the holy man's
sitting, I was soon actually eating with the same fork which he had
carried to his mouth!

"Now he's sleeping fairly well," whispered the woman, indicating the
sick man. "A little while ago he was constantly pulling threads from
the coverlet."

I knew it was looked upon as a bad omen when a sick person pulled at
and dug into the coverlet: "He's digging his grave," they say with us.
I therefore answered, "Yes, that's what my father did, too, when he had
typhoid fever; still, he got well again."

"I think so, too," she said; "and the priest was saying the same thing.
I am so glad my Sepp has always gone to confession so regular, and I
feel quite hopeful about his getting well again. Only," she added very
low, "the light keeps flickering to and fro the whole time."

According to popular belief, when the light flickers, it is an omen
that someone's candle is burning low in the socket. I believed in this
sign myself, but to reassure the poor woman I said, "There's such a
draught coming through the window, I can feel it too." She laid the
sleeping baby upon the straw--the girl who had fetched me had already
gone to rest there--and we stopped the cracks of the window with tow.

Then the woman said, "You'll stay with me overnight, won't you, Peter?
I shouldn't know how to get along otherwise; and when he awakes you
will read to us? I am sure you'll do us this kindness, won't you?"

I opened the book and looked for a suitable piece, but Father Cochem
has not written much that would be of consolation to poor suffering
mankind. Father Cochem's opinion is that God is infinitely just and
that men are unutterably bad, and nine-tenths of them are bound
straight for hell.

Maybe it is so, I used to think to myself; but even if it is one ought
not to say so, because people would only worry, and for the rest would
most likely remain as bad as ever. If they had wanted to mend, they
would have done so long ago.

Terrifying thoughts went like a hissing adder through Cochem's book.
Whenever I had to do with indifferent people, who only listened to me
on account of my fine loud preaching voice, I thundered forth all the
horrors and the eternal damnation of mankind with real pleasure; but
when by a sick-bed I used to exert my imagination to the utmost while
reading out of the book, in order to soften the hard sayings, to
moderate the hideous representations of the Four Last Things, and to
give a friendlier tone to the whole thought of the zealous Father.

And now again I planned how, while apparently reading from the book, I
would speak to Meisensepp words from another Book about poverty,
patience, and love towards our fellows, and how the true imitation of
Christ consisted in the practice of these, and how--when the last hour
should strike--this would lead us by way of a gentle death right into
heaven.

At last Sepp awoke. He turned his head, looked at his wife and
sleeping children, then, seeing me, he said in a loud, clear voice, "So
you've come, Peter? God reward you for it! But we shall hardly have
time for reading to-day. Anne, please wake the children up."

The woman shuddered, her hand went to her heart, but she said quietly,
"Are you worse again, Seppel? You've been sleeping so nicely."

He saw at once that her calmness was not genuine.

"Don't you fret, wife," he said, "it must be so in this world. Wake the
children up now, but gently, so that you don't scare them."

The poor woman went to the bed of straw, and with trembling hand shook
the bundle, and the little ones started up only half awake.

"Anne, I beg you don't pull the children about so," the sick man
reproached her, with a weaker voice, "and let little Martha sleep, she
doesn't understand things yet."

I remained seated by the table, and my heart burned within me. The
little family gathered round the bed, sobbing aloud.

"Quietly now," said Sepp to the children; "mother will let you sleep
all the longer to-morrow morning. Josefa, draw the shirt together over
your breast or you will get cold.--Now then, children, you must always
be brave and good and obedient to your mother, and when you are grown
up you must stand by her and don't leave her. All my days I've toiled
and moiled, but for all that I've nothing else to leave you beyond this
house, with the little garden and the ridge-acre with the stacks. If
you want to divide it up, do so in a brotherly way; but it is better to
keep the little property together, and keep the home going, somehow,
and till the ground. Beyond that I make no will. I love you all alike.
Don't forget me, and now and then say an Our Father for me. And you
four boys, I beg from my very heart, don't start poaching--it leads to
no good. Give me your hand on it. There, that's right! If one of you
would like to learn saw-sharpening--I have earned many a penny with
it and the tools are all there. And then, as you know already, if you
plant potatoes on the ridge-acre, you must do so in May. It's quite
true, what my father always used to say, 'Of potatoes it is said:
"Plant me in April, I come when I will; plant me in May, I'm there in a
day."' Bear that saying in mind! There, now go to bed again, or you
will catch cold; always take care of your health; health is everything.
Go to sleep, children."

The sick man became silent and fell to plucking at his covering again.

Turning to me the woman whispered, "I don't like it, he's talking too
much." When a very sick person becomes suddenly talkative that too is
looked upon as a bad omen with us.

Then he lay quite exhausted. The woman lit a death-taper.

"Not yet, Anne, not yet," he murmured, "a little later; but give me a
drop of water, will you?"

After drinking he said, "Ah, fresh water is a good thing after all!
Take good care of the well. Yes, and don't let me forget, the black
breeches and the blue jacket--you know--and outside behind the door,
where the saws hang, there leans the planing board; lay it across the
grindstone and the bench--it will serve for the three days. To-morrow
early, when Woodman Josel comes, he'll help to lay me out. But mind
that the cat isn't about; cats are attracted and know at once when
there is a corpse anywhere. It's all arranged what they'll do with me
down at the Parish Church.--My brown coat and the big hat, give them to
the poor. And to Peter you must give something because of his coming up
here. Perhaps he will be good enough to read to-morrow. It will be a
fine day to-morrow, but don't go far from home, for fear an accident
might happen, when there's candles left burning in the entrance. Later
on, Anne, look in the bedstraw and you will find an old stocking with a
few gold pieces in it."

"Seppel, don't exert yourself with talking so much," sobbed the wife.

"Well, well, Anne--but I must tell you everything. We'll not be much
longer together now. We have had twenty years, Anne. You have been
everything to me; no one can repay you for what you have been to me. I
shall never forget it, not in death, nor in heaven neither. I am only
glad that in my last hour I am still able to talk to you, and that I am
clear in my head to the last."

"Don't fret yourself, Seppel," murmured the wife, bending over him.

"No," he answered quietly, "with me it's just as it was with my father:
content in life, content in death. You be the same, and don't take it
too much to heart. Even though each of us must go as we came, alone,
still we belong to each other and I shall keep you a place in heaven,
Anne, close by my side. Only, for God's sake, bring the children up
well."

The children lay quiet. It was very still, and it seemed to me as if,
somewhere in the room, I could hear a slight whirring and humming.

Suddenly, Seppel called out, "Now, Anne, light the candle, quick!"

The woman ran about the room looking for matches, and yet the torch was
still burning. "Now he is going to die!" she moaned.

When at last the red wax-taper was alight, and she had given it him and
he held it clasped with both his hands, and she had taken the vessel of
holy water from the shelf, she became apparently quite calm and prayed
aloud: "Jesus, Mary, help him! Oh, Saints of God, stand by him in his
direst need, do not let his soul be lost! Jesus, I pray by Thy holiest
suffering! Mary, I call upon Thy seven Sacred Dolours! And Thou, his
guardian angel, when the soul must quit the body, lead it at last to
heavenly joy!"

And she prayed long. She neither sobbed nor cried now; not a single
tear stood in her eye, she was wholly the devout petitioner and
intercessor.

At length she became silent, bent over her husband's face, watched his
weak breathing and whispered, "God be with you, Seppel; greet my
parents for me and all our kinsfolk there in Eternity. God bless and
keep you, my dearest man! May the holy angels attend you, and the Lord
Jesus in His mercy await you at the heavenly door."

Perhaps he no longer heard her. His pale, half-open lips gave no
answer. His eyes stared at the ceiling. The wax candle, held upright in
the folded hands, was burning; it did not flicker. The flame was still
and bright as a snow-white bud, his breath moved it no more.

"Now it's over--he's dead and gone from me!" cried his wife in a
shrill, heartrending voice; then sank down upon a stool and began to
weep bitterly. The children, now again wakened, wept with her, all
except the baby, who was smiling.

The hour weighed upon us heavy as a stone. At last the poor woman--the
widow--rose, dried her tears and laid two fingers on the eyes of the
dead. The wax candle burned until the morning dawned.

A messenger had passed through the forest. Then came the Woodman Josel.
He sprinkled the dead with holy water, murmuring, "So they go, one
after the other."

Then they dressed Meisensepp out in his best clothes, carried him into
the porch, and laid him on the board.

I left the book on the table for the vigil of the following nights at
which I had promised the poor woman to read. When I was ready to go,
she brought a green hat on which was fastened a spreading
"Gemsbart."[9]

"Will you take the hat with you for your father?" she asked; "my Seppel
has always been so fond of your father. The Gemsbart you may keep
yourself as a remembrance. Say an Our Father for him now and then."

I uttered my thanks and cast one more timid look at the bier. There lay
Sepp stretched at full length, and his hands folded across his breast.
And I went away down through the forest. How bright and fresh with dew,
how full of the song of birds, full of the scent of flowers--how full
of life the forest was! And in the hut, stretched on the bier, lay a
dead man.

I can never forget that night and that morning--that death amidst the
forest's infinite source of life.

To this day I keep the Gemsbart in memory of Meisensepp. And whenever a
desire for the pleasures of this world gets hold of me, or when doubts
of God's grace to man, or fear of my own possibly far-off, possibly
quite near end assail me, I just stick Sepp's Gemsbart in my hat.

FOOTNOTE:

[9] Gemsbart: a little tuft of hair on the chamois' breast.




X

The Corpus Christi Altar


When the triumphant Saviour passes through the village in the shape of
bread, they greet Him with palms. The palm of the alps is the birch.
Even as the little fir-trees are doomed to lose their lives at
Christmas-time, so do the birches at Corpus Christi. They are dragged
to the village by the hundred, on great drays, and planted in rows on
both sides of the streets through which the procession is intended to
go. And, as they stand there in the fresh-turned earth, with their
graceful branches rustling in the soft wind, it is as though they were
still leading the young and happy lives of their brothers and sisters
in the woods. And no one notices that the trunk stands in the earth
without its roots, chopped off by the axe, that the sap no longer
courses through its veins, that, in a few days, the pretty little
notched and heart-shaped leaves will turn yellow; nor does the
caterpillar on a yielding branch, as it dreams of its coming butterfly
existence, suspect that it is rocking upon a corpse.

Life is fulfilled: lo, the Lord cometh.

At the Corpus Christi procession, the gospels are read in the open air
at four different spots. For this purpose, the people set up four
altars, so that "the Lord God may rest on His journey." By ancient
custom, it falls to him upon whose ground the altar is to stand to
erect this altar. Its several parts, all nicely carved and painted,
have rested during the year in a dark corner of the loft and are now
brought forth, cleansed of their dust and cobwebs and put together in
the open. The result is often a noble building of the chapel order,
with altar-table, tabernacle, worshipping angels, candlesticks and all.
Farm-labourers, who but yesterday were digging manure, to-day prove
themselves accomplished architects, building the altar before the
sun-down and surrounding it with a little wood of birch or larch. The
head of the house places all the images of the saints which he
possesses on the altar, or fastens them high up on the pillars. The
farmer's wife brings gaudy pots of crimson peonies to adorn the altar;
and the little girls strew flowers and rose-leaves as a carpet for the
steps.

The bells begin to ring, the mortars boom, music swells far and wide
over the roofs, lights burn in every window; and the time has come for
the farmer to light the candles on his altar too. Soon the first
pennants come in sight, the hum is heard of the men's prayers and the
echo of the women's singing; and the long lines of children approach,
the girls in white, carrying gaily-coloured banners above their heads.
Finally, the band, with shrill trumpets and rumbling drums, and then
the _baldachino_, the red canopy upheld by four men, and, under it,
surrounded by ministrants and acolytes, the priest, carrying the
gleaming monstrance high before his face.

The monstrance, as we all know, is the house in which the Host resides
surrounded by a wreath of golden rays, resting on a crescent-shaped
holder and protected by a crystal glass.

The most important factor in this procession is faith; and that is
present in abundance. They worship not the bread, but the symbolic
mystery in whose lap rests our eternal destiny. It is really incorrect
to speak of the worship of images, or of the idolatry of the heathen:
they all mean one and the same thing, the symbolic divine mystery which
each represents to himself after his own fashion and feels according to
his nature. And the power to transfer the intangible, endless mystery
to a substance which our senses can apprehend and thus to enter into
more intimate relations with it: that power is the gift of faith.

The files of people reach the open-air altar and the foremost have to
pass along until the priest arrives at the spot. When there, he places
the Sacrament in the tabernacle and reads some verses from one of the
four gospels. Then, to the booming of the cannon, he lifts the
monstrance, turns with it to the four points of the compass and blesses
the meadows, the fields and the air, that the summer may be fruitful
and no storm destroy the husbandman's labour. And the procession moves
on.

This is in the larger villages. In the small mountain districts, the
feast is celebrated more simply, but no less solemnly. As, in such
places, all the lanes and streets are formed of live trees and shrubs,
there is no need to set up birches, except at the wayside crucifixes,
where they keep holy guard, one on the right and one on the left. As
the people of small places have not four altars to erect, there is a
small, portable altar, a little four-legged table with a white cloth to
cover it and a tabernacle with angels painted on a blue ground kneeling
before the "Holy Name." Above this is a little canopy with gold
tassels. Behind are straps by means of which a boy can take the altar
on his back and carry it, during the procession, from one gospel-place
to the other.

They have one of these little altars at Kathrein am Hauenstein. Should
you care to see it, it stands, in summer, in the church, in front of
the great picture of the Fourteen Helpers.[10] It has stood there as
long as I can remember; and, in my young days, it was the duty and the
privilege of Kaunigl, him with the hare-lip, to carry it from
gospel-place to gospel-place. As soon as one gospel was read and the
procession starting on its way again, he strapped the altar to his
back, took the candlesticks and the hassock in his hands and hurried
over the hill by the short cut through the woods, so as to obtain a
lead and set up the altar in the next place. He would fix a stone or
two under the feet of the little table to prevent any rocking, put the
hassock in position and light the candles; and, by that time, the first
banner was once more in sight.

Now it happened, one day, that this was the occasion of my being mixed
up in a business that threatened the destruction of my immortal soul. I
had just reached the age when nobody knows how a young scamp is going
to turn out. He may develop into a more or less decent fellow, or else
into a lout of the first water: who can tell? None but God really; and
even He leaves the choice to the lanky, pale-faced lad himself. On the
day in question, I had either overslept myself in my forest home or had
more trouble than usual in getting my lace-boots on; or perhaps
breakfast was not ready in time. Anyhow, by the time I reached Kathrein
church, everything was in full swing, with the red banners waving and
the candles twinkling between the trees. I stole round to the back, for
I was mortally ashamed to do the right thing and simply go straight up
to the procession and mix with the people. Here again God left the
choice to me, to join the worshippers or slink away through the bushes
like a gaol-bird. I slunk like a gaol-bird through the bushes and there
met Kaunigl with the altar. He at once asked me to help him carry it.
This suited me perfectly, for it justified the roundabout road which I
had taken. I relieved Kaunigl of the hassock and candlesticks; and we
hurried through the young trees up to the Föhrenriegel, behind the
church, where the last gospel was to be read. We worked together
loyally; and soon the little altar was fixed against the rock, with the
candles burning upon it. The procession was not yet in sight, for it
had taken a longer road through the green fields; but this Kaunigl boy
was not the fellow to let time slip by and be wasted. He thrust his
hand in his trousers-pocket, produced a pack of cards and flung it on
the altar so that the candles flickered before the fluttering bits of
pasteboard. Silently, as though what he was doing were a matter of
course, he dealt himself and me a hand at _Brandel_. It was not the
first time that he and I had "taken each other on"; so I picked up the
cards and we played a strict game on the Corpus Christi altar, by the
light of the wax candles burning solemnly. There was time for a second
"bout"; and then, while Kaunigl was dealing the cards again, the men at
the head of the procession appeared round the corner, praying aloud
with heads uncovered. No cat could have pounced upon nimble mouse
quicker than Kaunigl gathered up those cards and shoved them in his
pocket. Then we took up our positions on either side, in all innocence,
and pulled off our caps.

Soon the musicians hove in sight: Eggbauer with the bugle-horn, his son
with the first trumpet, Naz the tailor (who afterwards became my
master) with the second, Erhard's boy with the clarionet, Zenz the
smith with the kettle-drum, while long-nosed Franz carried the big drum
on his back, to be pounded with might and main by the Haustein
innkeeper. Ferdl the huntsman handled the "tinklers."

Behind this loud music came the _baldachino_. The old white-haired
parish priest carried the Most Holy high in front of him and held his
head bowed low, partly in veneration and partly because age had already
greatly bent his neck. He walked up to the little altar to place the
monstrance on it. He was on the point of doing so when suddenly he
stopped and stood for a moment with a stare upon his face. He had
caught sight of the ten of clubs peeping from between the folds of the
white altar-cloth! The confounded card had remained there hidden and
unperceived! To decorate the Corpus Christi altar with "green" of this
kind[11] could hardly seem correct in the eyes of his reverence.
Without a word, without a sign of displeasure, he turned to the rock
and placed the monstrance on a projecting stone.

Only a very few people had realised why this was done. The gospel was
read and the benediction given without further incident, but I peeped
through the hazel-bushes and saw that the old priest was white to the
lips. Had he shown anger at his discovery on the altar, had he stormed
and ordered the culprit to be taken by the ears, I should have thought
it no more than just; but his humble silence, his look of sorrow, and
the fact that he had to place the Saviour, rendered homeless by that
sacrilegious game at cards, upon the bare rock: these were things that
cut into me as with a knife. He cannot have known who the accomplice
was, but he could easily have found out by my conscience-stricken face,
however much it might try to hide itself behind the hazel-bushes.

Afterwards, when high mass began in church, Kaunigl pulled me by the
skirt of my jacket and invited me to climb into the tower with him,
where we could toll the bell at the Sanctus and the elevation and play
cards in between. He had recovered possession of the ten of clubs.
True, I did not accept; but I remained lost, for all that. From that
day forward I no longer ventured into the confessional. Kaunigl did
venture in; but it was not quite so simple as he imagined, as he
himself told me afterwards.

"I have played cards," he confessed. "Once."

"Well," said the priest, "card-playing is no sin in itself, as long as
you do not play for money."

"No, I didn't play for money."

"Where did it happen?"

"On a table."

"What sort of a table?"

"A wooden one."

"Was it on the Corpus Christi table, by any chance?" asked the priest.

"Oh, no!" said Kaunigl.

And then he received absolution.

"Then you lied in your confession!" I said to Kaunigl, reproachfully.

"That doesn't matter," Kaunigl replied, promptly. "I can easily mention
the lie next time: I'll get that through the grating right enough. The
thing is to have the card-playing off my chest. Hang it all, though, I
was nearly caught: Old Nick might have grabbed me finely!"

I based my own inferences upon this experience. If card-playing was no
sin in itself--and we did not play for money--then there was no need to
confess the story. Nor is it stated in either the Lesser or the Greater
Catechism that man shall not play cards on altars. However, this subtle
interpretation helped me not at all. When I thought of that Corpus
Christi sacrilege, in which I had so foolishly taken part, I often felt
quite ill. I dreamt of it at nights, in the most uncomfortable way,
and, sitting in church on Sundays, I dared not look at that little
altar-table, which stood there so oddly, as though at any moment it
might burst into speech and betray me. Moreover, about this time, I
read in an old devotional book the story of a blasphemous shoemaker's
assistant who had mimicked the elevation of the Host in a public-house
and how his upraised arms had stiffened in the act, so that he could
not bend them back again and had to go about with his arms sticking up
in the air, until he was released by receiving absolution from a pious
father. It was much as though I were doomed to go about with arm
uplifted, holding the best trump in my hand, while the people laughed
at me: "Now then, Peter, play! Why don't you play?" and as though I
played the card, at last, and, in so doing, played my poor soul to
perdition. That was the sort of thing; and a nice thing too!

I could never manage to settle it by myself: that was quite clear. So,
one evening, after working-hours, I went to see the parish-priest at
St. Catherine's. He was standing just outside the house, beside his
fish-pond, which was covered over with a rusty wire netting, while a
fine spring bubbled away in the middle. The priest no doubt thought
that I was merely passing by accident, for he beckoned to me with his
black straw hat to come to him.

"What do you say, Peter?" he cried to me, in his soft voice. "Nine and
five and seven: doesn't that make twenty-one?"

I was never much good at mental arithmetic; however, this time, I
hazarded, on the off-chance:

"Yes, that should be about right. Twenty-one."

"Now then," he said, "just look here." And he pointed to the fish-pond.
"A fortnight ago, the Blasler boy sold me nine live trout and I put
them in the pond. A week ago, he sold me five more and I put them in
too; and, to-day, he sold me seven and I put them in as well. And how
many are there now, all told? Eight, eight; and not one more! And I
know all about it: they are the same which he brought me a fortnight
ago; and it must be so: the scoundrel, I was almost saying, stole the
fish each time out of the pond and sold them to me over again. It's a
... a ..."

And he shook his fist in the air.

The fact was that the Blasler boy must have stolen the trout to begin
with, before he sold them for the first time, for Blasler had no
fishing licence. This, I dare say, hardly occurred to the good priest's
mind: he was thinking only of his fast-days. The commandments of the
Church allow fish on Fridays and Saturdays,[12] but do not say whether
the fish may be stolen or not.

It was not a favourable opportunity to confess one's sins. So I forbore
for the present, kissed the sleeve of his coat, because the clenched
fist did not look inviting for a kiss of the hand, and passed on. On
the way, I pondered the question at length, which was the greater sin,
the Blasler boy's or mine. His appeared to me in the light of a piece
of roguery, whereas mine might easily be a sin against the Holy Ghost;
and those sins are not remitted.

A few days later, Cap Casimir, of Kressbachgraben, was driving a grey
nanny-goat with two kids along the road. The old goat had a full udder;
and the young ones skipped around her and wanted to have a drink. But
Cap Casimir hissed, in his sloppy brogue:

"Sshh, shtop that now! We musht bring the full udder to hish
reverensh!"

I was at once curious to know what it meant; and Casimir, who was an
immigrant Tyrolese and still wore his pointed "star-pricker,"[13] said:

"It'sh like thish, you

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