The Forest Schoolmaster

The Schoolmaster’s Story

Part First “Dear God!

“I greet Thee, and write Thee a piece of news. My father died to-day. He has been ill two years. Everybody says it is most fortunate. My aunt Lies says so too. They have carried father away now. The body goes to the mortuary, the soul through purgatory, then up to heaven. And now, dear God, I have a great favour to ask. Please send an angel to meet my father and show him the way. I will enclose my christening-money for the angel; there are three groschen. I am sure my father will be happy in heaven, and please take him directly to my mother. Many greetings to Thee, dear God, and to my father and mother.

“ANDREAS ERDMANN.

“SALZBURG. In the year of our Lord 1797. Apostle Simon’s Day.”

This letter has been preserved by chance, so I will begin with it. I remember the day still. In my great innocence, I was about to wrap the three groschen in the paper, when my Aunt Lies came in, read the letter with her glassy eyes, and clapping her hands together, cried: “What a stupid boy!” Hastily taking my christening-money, she ran away, telling my story all over the house, from the porter’s room up to the third floor, where lived an old umbrella-maker. Our room was soon filled with neighbours, curious to see the stupid boy.

They laughed at me until I began to cry. Then they laughed still more provokingly. The old umbrella-maker, with his sky-blue apron, was also there. Raising his hand, he said: “My friends, this is foolish laughter; perhaps the child is wiser than any of you. Come to me, little one; thy good father died to-day; thy aunt is far too clever, and her house too small for thee, my wee lad. Come with me, and I will teach thee to make umbrellas.”

Oh, how my aunt scolded at that! But I believe that in her heart of hearts she was glad; for I went up the two flights of stairs with the old man.

At the time of my father’s death, I must have been in my seventh year. I only know that, up to my fifth year, my parents lived in the forest, by the side of a lake. Rocky mountains, woods, and water enclosed the place, and here my father held an official position in the salt-works. When my mother died, his health began to fail, and since he was obliged to give up his work, we moved to his well-to-do sister’s in town. He wished to take an easier situation there, that he might compensate his sister, who was the very pattern of economy, for food and lodging. But he was ill a long time, and, besides teaching me to read and write, he did nothing. And so it came about as I have already written.

I remained with the old man in the third story a number of years. Like him, I too, wore a sky-blue apron. In that way one saves clothes. We made nothing but blue and red umbrellas, which we carried in big bundles to the fairs and sold. Opening one large umbrella over our wares, our booth was ready. If business flourished, so that we could sell the booth itself, we went to the inn for a good dinner; otherwise we made the wares up in bundles, and carried them home again, there satisfying our hunger with a warm soup.

When my master was over seventy years old, he suddenly became weary of the blue and red canvas; he was forced to seek another tent—he died—died and left me, as my father had done.

I was his heir. Two dozen and a half umbrellas were my inheritance. These I packed up one day and carried to the fair, where we had previously been successful in selling our goods.

Suddenly at noon, a storm comes up; the people are as though swept from the market-place, and with them my umbrellas; a single one being left with which to cover myself and my hard-earned money. Just then a gentleman, splashing through the puddles, hurries across the square to buy my umbrella.

“Then I should have none for myself,” I say.

“I have seen many a shoemaker going barefoot,” laughs the man; “but, see here, youngster, we will find some way to arrange it. Are you from town?”

“Yes,” I answer, but no “shoemaker.” “That does not matter. There is no carriage to be had; so we will walk together, boy, and use the same umbrella; afterwards you may either keep it or have the money for it.”

Thinking to myself, it were a thousand pities to spoil his fine coat, I assented to his proposal.

So I, the poor umbrella-maker’s boy, walked into town arm-in-arm with the grand gentleman. On the way we chatted with one another. He understood drawing me out, and after awhile I had told him my whole history, with all its circumstances.

The rain ceased, and as we approached the town I tried to fall behind, as I thought it unseemly to walk through the streets with such a finely dressed man. But, in a very friendly way, he invited me to keep beside him, at last taking me into his house, offering me food and drink, and finally asking me to remain with him altogether; he was a bookseller, and in need of an assistant.

Unskilled even in umbrella-making, and not knowing what occupation to take up next, I accepted the situation.

Fortune smiled upon me in those days. I was pleased with my master; he had fully recompensed me for the shelter of my umbrella; but as an assistant I was not a success. I was filled with curiosity; I wished to examine the contents of every book which I took into my hand. The placing and putting the volumes in order was entirely forgotten.

My master surprised me one day by saying: “Boy, you are useless for the outside of books; you must devote yourself to the inside. I think it would be wise to send you to school.”

“Oh, if you only could! That is just what I have been secretly longing for.”

“We shall probably succeed in placing you in the Academy, where, if honest and industrious, you will advance rapidly, and before you know it—hear yourself called: Doctor Erdmann!”

On hearing this, I became greatly excited, and still more so when my master had accomplished his purpose. I entered the Academy and plunged straight into the inside of books. But in school one has only the dullest kind; the interesting ones are all forbidden, and I was forced to crowd my brain with subjects which appealed to me neither from without nor from within.

My bills of fare through the week were varied. My dinners I took: Mondays with a teacher; Tuesdays with a baron; Wednesdays with a merchant; Thursdays with a schoolmate, the son of a rich manufacturer; Fridays with an old lieutenant; Saturdays with some very poor people in an attic, and in payment I gave the children lessons in arithmetic; and Sundays I was with my protector, the bookseller. And I have also worn clothing given me by all these people.

So it went on for a number of years. Then my Tuesday’s host engaged me as tutor to his little son. My prospects now seemed brighter. I gave up dining with my attic friends, but continued the instruction of their children. One day, I donned my dress-coat—very fine and respectable, but not made for me—and visited my aunt. Making me a most elegant bow, she called me her dear, her very dear Sir Nephew.

Although I entered into my studies with great eagerness at first, they soon become distasteful to me. I had always supposed that in an Academy one could grasp both heaven and earth, and learn to know the beautiful harmony of everything therein.

Fine subjects were on the prospectus. Even in the lower classes, we had geography, history, geometry and languages. But it was a world turned upside down. In geography, in place of countries and nations, we merely studied principalities and their cities. In history, instead of searching after the natural development of mankind, we were learning about statecraft; the teacher was constantly discussing the high royal families and their genealogies, intrigues, and battles; the fool knew nothing else to talk about. In geometry, we puzzled our heads with problems, which neither the teacher nor the pupils understood, and which would be useless to us in after life. The study of languages was a perfect misery. Alas! Our beautiful German is dressed up in a way to break one’s heart. For many years it has been laden by foreign words, yes, even sentenced to death by their high jurisdiction. If a German lad wishes to do honour to his pure mother-tongue, then dozens of highly learned men rush in with their Greek and Latin, the dead letters of the dead language destroying even the German sounds. I very well know what great blessings the literature of Homer and Virgil contain for the badly-abused German tongue; our Klopstock and Schiller bear witness to that. But the Pharisees of whom I speak insist on the letter, and not on the spirit. We are obliged to learn by heart the most absurd theories, evolved by blundering men centuries ago. And whoever does not like, or cannot comprehend the dry stuff, will be abused by the teachers. We are defenceless; they have us in their power. We must laugh at their jokes; if they have the toothache, we are made to suffer for it. Alas! what a wretched competition and strife; for penniless boys, utter misery!

While I was in the institution, two scholars committed suicide. “Very well,” said the Director of the school, “he who does not bend must break.” And that was the funeral sermon.

On the day following one of these sad occurrences, it happened to be my turn to deliver a Latin oration, before my teachers and fellow-students, on the character of the Roman kings. I came directly from the bier of my unfortunate comrade and with excited brain mounted the platform. “I will compare the Romans with the Germans,” I cried; “the old tyrants enslaved the body, the new ones enslave the intellect. Outside there in the dark chamber, deserted and dishonoured, lies one hunted to death, not the only victim who has sought refuge in the grave....”

I may have said a few words more; but they then approached, and smiling led me down from the platform. “Erdmann is out his mind,” said one of the masters; “he should not speak in German but in Latin. The next time he will do better.”

Nearly crazed, I staggered home. Heinrich, the cloth-maker’s son, my table and school companion, hurried after me. “What hast thou done, Andreas? What hast thou said?”

“Too little, too little,” I replied.

“That will be thy ruin, Andreas; return at once and ask pardon for thy offence.”

I laughed in my friend’s face. Moved, he grasped me by the hand saying: “By Heaven, thou hast spoken the truth, and for that very reason they will never forgive thee for those words!”

“Nor do I care.” I replied defiantly.

Heinrich walked beside me in silence. Finally he said: “Thou must learn wisdom, Andreas; but now go and compose thyself.”

My hand trembles as I write this; yet it was all over long ago.

One year previous to this occurrence, I had through my friend Heinrich obtained the position of tutor in the aristocratic family of Baron von Schrankenheim.

My task was not heavy. I had one boy to teach and prepare for the Hochschule. Here I fared well and I was no longer obliged to beg my dinners at different tables. My pupil, Hermann, a fine, studious boy, was fond of me, as was also his sister, an extraordinarily beautiful girl,—and I was her devoted friend.

But, as the time passed, it became oppressive and uncomfortable for me in the wealthy household. Always somewhat timid and self-conscious, I now felt my position more keenly than ever, for they were all aware of my poverty, and even the servants often slipped little presents into my hand.

But my pupil possessed delicacy of feeling, and was happy and confidential with me; and the girl—oh, what a beautiful child she was!

Evenings, when strolling outside of the city, or over distant flowery meadows and wooded slopes, I would often find myself thinking: What a blissful thing to be beautiful and rich! My heart was hot; I dreamed of “flowers and stars and her eyes.”—Whose eyes? Then springing up in alarm—Mein Gott, what am I doing? Andreas, Andreas, what will come of it?

I was eighteen years old at that time. In my perplexity I one day confided in my friend Heinrich, who had always understood me better than anyone, and he counselled me to conquer myself, telling me that nearly all young people were afflicted with the same malady, which would soon pass. Hardly five years older than I, and this was his advice.

Left alone in my trouble, I decided that, although young in years, I would consider the matter calmly—notwithstanding the advice of clever people. Of my poverty I was well aware; my ordinary ancestry impelled me to make something of myself. He was right; in the presence of my teachers I should control myself, tame my obstinate will, and with perseverance and industry submit to the institution. Notwithstanding the injustice that must be endured, in a few years I should become Doctor, or a most learned Master of Arts.

And a Master of Arts may surely ask the hand of a baron’s daughter. Like a man, I will then go and woo her.

However, keeping my intentions secret, I devoted myself earnestly to my studies, becoming one of the first among my fellow-students. I progressed rapidly and drew nearer and nearer to my goal. I already saw the day when as a man of dignity and standing I might pay court to the maiden. The family seemed fond of me and the Baron, not over-proud of his aristocracy, would not object to a learned man for son-in-law. I was indeed most fortunate and happy. Then the final examinations were taken, and my professors—rejected me.

I went directly home, and appeared before the father of my pupil: “Sir, I thank you for all your kindness to me. I cannot remain longer in your house.”

Looking at me in great astonishment, he asked, “Where are you going?”

“I do not know, but I must leave this town at once.”

The good man told me that I was over excited and ill. What had happened to me, might happen to others as well; he would see that I was cared for, and in the quiet of his home I would soon recover, and in a year pass the examination successfully.

But I persisted in my determination to go away; I was well aware that the cause of my failure was the German speech on the Latin kings, and for this reason I should never be allowed to pass the examination. Heinrich was right.

“Very well, my obstinate sir,” concluded the nobleman, “then I release you.”

Of whom should I take leave? Of my young pupil? Of the young lady? Mein Gott, lead me not into temptation! She was still so young. She dismissed me pleasantly, and in a friendly manner. A poor wretch was leaving to return a made man. I was more defiant than courageous.

I paid one more visit to my aged aunt. And, as I this time appeared in a coarse cotton jacket, instead of a fine coat, and announced my intention of going away, I knew not where,—I all but received my expressive appellation again. “No,” she cried, “no, but thou art a—a—most extraordinary man! To think, after having been so good and upright, and now,—oh, dear, be off with thee!”

She was the only relative I had in the world.

Last of all I went to Heinrich: “I thank thee a thousand times for thy love, my faithful friend. Would that I could reward thee for it. Thou knowest what has happened. There is nothing left for me but to go away. When I have accomplished something worthy I will come back and repay thee.”

I was very young when I set my foot into the wide world. Heinrich accompanied me a long distance. At parting he forced me to accept his ready money. Heart to heart we swore one another eternal faithfulness, then we separated.

O Heinrich! Thou good heart, true as gold, thou hast kept thy word with me. And I have repaid thee badly—yes, infernally, Heinrich!

TO THE WARS

The sun moves from east to west; it pointed out my way. “Farewell, old world,” I said, “I am going to the Tyrol!” There the people are now uniting against the enemy. The demon Bonaparte is leading in the French, and our fatherland will be entirely crushed.

A few days later I am at Innsbruck. Mounting the citadel steps, I ask the gatekeeper if I may speak with Andreas Hofer.

“Who will hinder you, then?” he replies, striking his sword against the marble with a resounding clash. Entering, I pass through a series of apartments, gorgeous with large mirrors, sparkling chandeliers, and floors which shine like glass and precious wood. Noisy peasant lads, dressed in Alpine costumes, are walking to and fro, singing, whistling, and smoking. At last I find myself in a large room filled with men, apparently peasants. Asking if I may speak with Andreas Hofer, I am informed that I must wait my turn, as he is occupied with affairs of state. I place myself in line, and watch the various people going in and out, until at last I am summoned into his presence.

A man in shirt-sleeves, with a full, heavy beard, rises and asks, “What do you want, then?”

“I want to join the army!” I reply.

The bearded man—he is Hofer all over—observing me closely, remarks in a low voice: “And so young! Have you father and mother?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you from the Tyrol?”

“No, but from the immediate neighbourhood.”

“A student, I presume! Do you wish to become a clergyman?”

“I should like to join the army, and fight for the fatherland.”

Putting his hand into his leather girdle, he takes out some silver pieces. “There my boy, God bless you! you had better go to Vienna and enlist with Carl. You are only an inexperienced youth. And besides, you are no countryman of ours.”

I make my salutation and start to go.

“Halloa, there!” he calls after me, holding the money towards me.

“Thank you, I do not want the money.”

At this his eye brightens. “Bravo! Bravo!” he cries. “Stay and become my secretary; I need one possessing both a good penmanship and a good conscience.”

“My conscience is also good enough for a soldier,” I answer gloomily.

“Here, Seppli!” cries Hofer at this, “bring this man rifle and knife! Oh, that ’s brave!” and he presses my hand, adding, “We shall soon have work enough.”

So I become a warrior, a Tyrolese guardsman. And soon I have work.

The French and the Bavarians and even the Austrians would not suffer a peasant king in the citadel at Innsbruck. The enemy, three times overthrown by the Tyrolese, had invaded the country in hordes. The rifle worked better in my hands than I had supposed possible. Everything in the past was forgotten, but I longed for my friend Heinrich at my side while fighting the enemy. I captured one French flag, and in trying for the second I was taken. Three bearded Frenchmen laughingly disarmed me, enraged boy that I was.... They made me prisoner and dragged me away, through Bavaria and Suabia on into France.

It is painful for me to describe that time. It was a very dog’s life,—a dog’s life, not because I lay for three years in prison in a foreign land, but because I was a rebel against my own country. In defiance of the Emperor—so it was reported—the Tyrolese had risen against Bavaria to which he had apportioned them. My German fellow-countrymen acknowledged it themselves, and so my unhappiness was complete. Instead of performing an heroic act, thou hast aided in an evil deed, Andreas; not as brave warrior but as deserter thou liest in chains.

A long march to Russia and to the Orient is talked of. Among many others of my countrymen I am liberated. Several try to reach their homes. I know nothing of any home and may know nothing. Poor fools like myself are worse off at home than elsewhere. And as a rebel, which I now am, I shall never return to my own land. I will do penance for my sad mistake of illegally bearing arms against the great conqueror. I will go with his troops and help to free the people of the Orient, and place them in subjection to the leader of the Occident. A great aim, Andreas, but a long journey. The Germans make the way very hard for us, but our commander marches with lightning-like rapidity in among the disorganised and scattered people, who can neither think great thoughts nor do great deeds. And for many weeks we drive the Russian army before us, over the wild steppes and endless snow-fields. But in Moscow the Russians throw firebrands between themselves and us, in the midst of their own capital. And we find ourselves buried in the land of unending winter, without support, resting-place, or means of subsistence. Man and nature are alike our enemy. Our chief, seeing that everything is lost, turns us back. Oh, the many desert storms, the hundreds of ice streams, the thousands and thousands of snowy graves, between us and the fatherland! Whoever can march with benumbed limbs bruised to the knees; whoever can tear the last tatters from the body of his dying comrade to cover himself; whoever is able to suck the warm blood from his own veins and eat the flesh of fallen horses and dead wolves; whoever understands warming himself with the snow for a cover and wrestling with the waves and flakes of ice; and, besides all this, knows how to conquer the fright, the terror, and the despair—he, perhaps, may see his home again.

Benumbed like my body are my soul and my brain; in a wilderness, under the snow-laden branches of a pine tree, I am left lying.

A smoky cabin, a bright fire, a long-bearded man and a dark-skinned maiden meet my gaze as I awake upon a couch of mats. A fur skin has been thrown over me. Outside is a roaring sound, like the raging of waters or like a storm. Those are good, friendly eyes which look at me from the two people. The man is tending the fire; the girl feeding me with milk. They are talking in their rough language, of which I cannot understand a word. I think of Heinrich and long for the pleasant sound of his voice. I am suffering terrible pains all over my body, which the man has wrapped in a wet cloth. The maiden holds a little cross before my eyes, murmuring something like a prayer. She is praying a dying blessing for thee, Andreas!

Thou dear, friendly house in the enemy’s land! What afterwards occurred there, I can no longer recall. The swarthy maiden often laid her hand on my brow. Had it only come then, it would have been a beautiful death; but it happened otherwise. Even now I can hear the blow that shattered the door. Soldiers forced their way in, maltreated the old man, and pushed the dark-skinned girl from my bedside. They carried me away from there, away through the storm and the wilderness—back to the army.

I felt as though I were being dragged from my home;—but it is God’s world everywhere. However my comrades had not deserted me; and that rejoiced my heart. Constant and true I resolved to stay by them and serve my great general.

On the Rhine I recovered. And in the young springtime I felt a new life stirring within me. A lad, counting but three-and twenty-years, I was inflamed with desire for all that was noble and just, for the common weal, for the brotherhood of man; in my enthusiasm I cried out with my comrades, “One God in heaven and one Lord on earth!” He is the deliverer, the quarrel of princes must now end. The nations must become one great, united people! Such thoughts inspired me. The dark eye of the general, like lightning in the night, inflamed us all. Against Saxony we marched, there to fight the battle for our leader, and to place the beautiful German country under his protection.

At Lützen I defended the life of a French general; at Dresden I killed Blücher’s horse from under him; at Leipzig I shot my Heinrich....

A NEW MISSION

“Andreas!” is his death-cry. Thus I know him. The blood bursts forth from his breast. I now come to myself. I throw my gun against a rock, shattering it in pieces; disarmed, I rush into battle; with his own sword I split the skull of a French officer.

What good has it done? I have fought against my fatherland, against the brothers who speak my language, while that of my French comrades I have scarcely understood. And I have shot my Heinrich. Alas, how late my eyes are opened!

“Thou art an inexperienced fellow; go to Vienna, to Carl!” Thou faithful Hofer, had I but followed thy advice! Thy flag was good, more glorious than all others in the wide land. From that hour when my faith in it was torn from my heart, my misfortunes began. Love for freedom in the world has made me captive; the expiation of my own mistake has led me into danger and torment; loyalty to my general and longing for a great, united whole has made me traitor to my fatherland, the murderer of my friend. Andreas, if virtue leads thee to crime, to what depths would evil intention have plunged thee? Thou hast proudly repelled the true leader, experience and guidance failed thee there. Andreas, thou hast given thyself to trade, to science, and to a soldier’s life; poverty, confusion, and repentance hast thou reaped. Foreigners have cared for and nursed thee like a son and a brother, and they have been maltreated for it. Thou bringest nothing good to the world or to mankind. Andreas, thou must go to the depths of the wilderness and become a hermit!

In Saxony, under the arms of a windmill, I repeated these truths to myself. And thereupon I departed, fled through Bohemia and Austria, and after many days arrived in the town of Salzburg. That anyone in this town should recognise me, a poor, sick, ruined fellow, I did not fear. In Peters-Friedhof my father lay buried. I wished to see the mound before seeking a cave for myself in some deserted ravine of the forest. And as I lay upon the cold, frozen earth, once more able to weep my heart out over my life, so young and so unfortunate, a gentleman appeared walking among the graves; he asked what troubled me, then with a gesture of astonishment exclaimed: “Erdmann, you here? And how changed you are! Gone scarcely four years and hardly to be recognised!”

Herr von Schrankenheim, the father of my former pupil was standing before me.

Walking up and down with him among the graves, I told him all. With wet eyes he pressed money into my hand: “There, get yourself some new clothes and then come to my house. Become a hermit!—that is no career for a brave young lad. You must overcome your despondency and begin life anew.”

I went to his house with great dread, for there was one folly which I had not yet conquered.

Herr von Schrankenheim presented his son to me. He had already become a tall, elegant gentleman. With his hands behind his back, he made me a silent bow, and after a little left us. Then his father, conducting me into his study, bade me take a seat in the softest easy-chair.

“Erdmann,” he began after awhile, “are you really in earnest in your desire to live a life of seclusion in the wilderness?”

“That is the best thing for me,” I answered. “I am worthless among people who live in joy and pleasure; in wandering and confusion, the few years of my youth have tossed me about from one land to another and amongst the misery of nations. Sir, I know the world and have enough of it.”

“You are hardly in your twenty-fourth year, and not yet at the height of your powers, and you wish to give up the service you might render your fellow-men?”

At that I listened attentively; the words impressed me.

“If you think that up to the present time you have only been the author of evil, why do you wish to escape from the dust without also giving the world and the community the good which surely slumbers in rich measure within you?”

I rose from my chair. “Sir, show me, then, the way to do it!

“Very well,” said Herr von Schrankenheim, “possibly I can, if you will sit down again and listen to me. Erdmann, I know of a distant and real hermitage, in which one could serve humanity and perhaps do something great for the community. Far from here, deep in among the Alps, stretches a large forest between rocky hills, where shepherds, herdsmen, wood-cutters, and charcoal-burners are working, and where others are also living who have perhaps honestly secluded themselves or dishonestly taken refuge there, and who drag out an existence by means of lawful or unlawful business. It is true churlish men are among them, whose hearts are gnawed by misfortune or something worse. They have neither priest nor doctor and also no school-teacher in their vicinity; they are quite deserted and isolated and have only their own incompetency and misguided natures upon which to depend. I am the owner of the forest. For a long time I have had the intention of sending someone to this region who should guide the inhabitants a little, assist them with good advice, and teach the children to read and write. The man might make himself very useful. And, indeed, it is not so easy to find one for the place; for it should be someone who, weary of the world, would like to live in seclusion, yet work for mankind. Erdmann, what do you think of that?”

At these words I felt impelled to seize his hand and say: “I am the man for it; dissatisfied with the condition of things in this old world, I will found a new one in the wilderness. A new school, a new parish,—a new life. Let me go to-day!” So the fire was not quite extinguished; sparks sometimes fly from ashes.

“Cold weather is at hand,” continued the Baron. “For the winter remain in my house and give the matter due consideration and when summer comes, if my offer still pleases you, then go to the forest.”

The rustling of a dress in the adjoining room filled me with alarm, and I finally took my leave, begging permission to go away for the winter, with the promise to return with the swallows and accept his proposal.

He would not be dissuaded from giving me the “means” for the coming season, but then I fled. In the front hall I caught a glimpse of a woman’s figure, past which I glided like a spectre.

One day I wandered as far as the woodland by the lake where my childhood and my mother lie buried. And here in this place I rented a small room for the winter. I often climbed the snowy slopes and, standing under moss-covered trees, was impressed with the feeling of having once stood there with my mother and father. I often walked over the frozen lake thinking of the days when I had crossed the gentle waves in a boat at my parents’ side, watching the sunset glow on the mountains and listening to the song echoes of a yellow-hammer resounding on the cliffs. My father and mother also sang. That was long ago; long ago.

I have lain in prison in France; I have wandered ill and dying over the deserts of Russia; and now I am living here in this dear, precious little room by the lake. All would have been well, the time of poverty forgotten like the image in a dream,—only it should never have dawned, that unhappy day in Saxonland—that will haunt me forever. Heinrich, I do not fear thy ghost; only come to me once, that I may say to thee: “It happened in blindness; I cannot alter it now; I will wipe it out with my own life.”...

RESOLVED

Now it is well. I have searched myself for many days; I have reviewed my former life and written it out here in a few words, that I may always keep it the more clearly before my eyes when new perplexities and troubles overwhelm me. In fact I think I have endured and am still able to endure the school of life better than the school of books and dead precepts. I have acquired understanding and have become calm. Having carefully considered my experiences and circumstances, my talents and inclinations, I think it no presumption to accept the proposal of Herr von Schrankenheim. Although outwardly still quite young, inwardly I am very old. The advice of an old man will surely be welcome to the dwellers in the forest.

THE FEAST OF ST. ANTHONY OF PADUA, SALZBURG, 1814.

It is right that I should go to the woods. I am equipped and all is ready. The Baron has promised me his assistance in everything. His son Hermann greeted me again with a friendly bow. The young gentleman is a little pale; he is probably very studious. His sister... (In the original two lines were here crossed out so many times that they had become entirely illegible.)

They say that my aunt is well. Not wishing to cause her the pain which she would have experienced at my appearance and my undertaking, I did not visit her again. Now they are blowing the post-horn. Farewell, beautiful town.

---

Already three days on the journey. However, this is a pleasanter expedition than the one over the winter steppes. Day before yesterday the green uplands changed into picturesque mountain regions. Yesterday we entered a broad, pleasant valley. To-day we are going up and down hills, through woods and ravines and by rocky cliffs. Now the road is becoming narrower and rougher; sometimes it is necessary to alight from the waggon and shove aside the broken blocks of stone. We see more chamois and deer than people. I was obliged to remain in debt for my night’s lodging to-day. The bank-note which I have with me the people in this region cannot change. I would have given my host something as security, but he assured me if I were to remain in the forests of the Winkel, I could easily send him the money by a messenger who came occasionally from that region. I must return the bank-note and ask for small coin.

---

On this the fourth day I have been set down. The post-chaise has gone on its way; for a while I still hear the clear horn resounding through the woods, and then all is silent and I sit here beside my bundle in the midst of the wilderness.

Through the ravine flows a stream which they call the Winkel, along which is a footpath. It leads over stones and roots and is sown with hard pine-needles of last year. By this road I must travel.

Through the branches yonder I see the gleam of a white plateau; that is a snow-field. And do people live in there?

IN THE WINKEL

So I will write it all out. For whom I do not know. Perhaps for the dear God to whom in my innocence I wrote the letter when my father died. My heart would break could I not talk over all that is unusual and sorrowful in my life. I will tell it to the sheet of paper. Perchance in the future it may be found by someone whom I can trust, though he but half understands me. You, pure, white leaves, shall now be my friends and share the years which may come to me. To-day my hair is still dark, while you are somewhat grey, but you may yet outlive me and become my future generation.

A little leaf of paper may live longer
Than the freshest spring-leaf upon God’s earth,
Than the fleetest chamois on the rocky cliff,
Than the curly-haired child in the peaceful dale.
A little sheet of paper, pale and fragile,
Is oft the one image, faithful and true,
That man leaves behind him for future time,
When o’er his dust his descendants tread.
His bones are scattered, the grave-stone gone,
The house destroyed, the works have vanished.
Who will then our footsteps trace
In the eternal Nature where we once held sway?
New men wrestle with fortunes new,
And think no more of those who are gone;
Then a leaf, with its pale ink tracings,
Is often the only enduring sign
Of the being who once lived and suffered,
Laughed and wept, enjoyed and struggled,
And the thought that from the heart was born
In pain or joy, or in mad jest,
Remains, and the eternal kiss
Casts it in an everlasting mould.
Oh, may it in future times,
Purified, touch the hearts of men!

I arrived here on a Saturday. As I stumbled along by the Winkel Water, I met here and there wood satyrs, brown and hairy, covered with moss and pitch, going about in their fustian smocks. They looked like exiled, withered tree-trunks, seeking for new ground where they might grow and flourish again.

Stopping in front of me, they stared in astonishment or glanced at me threateningly, while they struck fire with tinder and flint for their pipes. Some of them had flashing eyes which sent forth sparks like those from the fire-stones; others very good-naturedly showed me the way. One rough, sturdy fellow, carrying a pack on his back with saws, axe, meal buckets, etc., stepped to one side, as he saw me coming, and murmured, “Gelobt sei Jesu Christ!”

“Forever and ever, amen!” was my answer, which seemed to give him confidence, for he accompanied me a short distance.

At last the valley widens a little. It is a small basin into which flow a number of streams from the different ravines, as well as from the cliffs that rise at my left hand. These form the Winkel. Here a thick log, hewn flat on the upper side, is laid across the brook, forming the path to a frame house standing on the edge of the woods.

This is the forestry, the only house of any size in the vicinity. Farther away in the defiles and valleys are the cabins of the shepherds and wood-cutters, and beyond, on the wooded hillsides, where large clearings have been made and charcoal-pits started, are villages of huts for the charcoal-burners.

They call this little valley Im Winkel. It still remains almost entirely in its primeval state, excepting the one large house, with its domestic surroundings and the footpath leading up to it.

The forestry is also called the Winkel-warden’s house. Here I entered and, placing my bundle upon a chest in the hall, seated myself beside it.

The forester was busy with workmen who were settling their accounts and receiving their monthly wages. He was a domineering, red-bearded man, and he dismissed the people somewhat roughly and curtly; but the men bore it good-naturedly and pocketed their money in silence.

The business finished, he rose and stretched his strong limbs, which were clothed in genuine and correct hunter’s costume. I now approached, handing him the credentials which I had brought from the owner of the forest.

This document contained everything essential. A nicely furnished room was assigned to me. A sturdy woman who was there to look after and arrange it, according to her own ideas, stopped suddenly before my open door, and with arms akimbo called out loud and shrilly, “Du lieber Himmel, is that how a schoolmaster looks?” She had never seen one in her life.

I was soon settled and had all my possessions in order. Politely knocking at my door, the forester then entered my room. Looking at my apartment, he asked, “Does it answer your purpose?”

“Oh, yes, very well,” I replied.

“Are you satisfied?”

“Yes, and I hope to be quite contented here.”

“Then I trust everything will be all right.”

He walked many times up and down over the plank floor, his hands thrust into his trousers’ pockets, and finally stopping in front of me he said:

“Now look about you and see what method you would like to adopt for your work. I leave here to-morrow and only come every Saturday into the Winkel. The remainder of the time I am busy in other localities, and my home is in Holdenschlag, four hours from here by the road. The idea of beginning a school immediately dismiss from your mind, my dear man. First we must do away with the old one. They are blockheads, I tell you! And you may as well know at once that we have all kinds of people in our woods. Nothing very bad can be charged against any one of them, but they have come here from the east and west—for what reason God only knows. They are mostly peasants from the outlying regions, who have fled into the forest to escape military service. There are also fellows among them whom one would hardly like to meet on a dark night. Poachers are they all. So long as they only shoot the game of the forest, we let them go about free; that cannot be helped, and the labour of their hands is needed. But if they shoot down a hunter, then of course we are obliged to arrest them. The most of them are married, but they did not all bring their brides from the altar. You will run across men and women who, even in this century, have never heard a church bell or seen a vestment. You will soon observe what an effect that has upon the people. Do it in whatever way you think best; but first you must become acquainted with them. And if you find that you can exert an influence over them, we will support you in it. You are still quite young, my friend; take care and be prudent! If you think best, take a boy for the first part of the time to show you your way about. And if you need anything, apply to me. I wish you well!”

With these words he departed. He, it seems, is now my master; may he also be my protector!

Although it was my first night in the Winkel, I slept soundly on the straw bed. The murmuring of the brook cheered my heart. It was the month of June, but the sun rose late over the forest and looked into my room in a friendly way.

In the morning I wander out of doors. All is fresh and green and sparkling with dew-drops, while on the wooded heights, as far as the eye can reach in the narrow valley, the bluish sun-web spins itself over the shadowy tree-trunks. Toward the west towers the battlement of rocks above which lie the meadows of the Alm, then rocky cliffs again, and over all stretch the wide, inhospitable fields of snow and ice, glittering like a white plateau.

If I am successful in my task here below, then sometime I will climb up to the glaciers. And above the glaciers towers at last the Graue Zahn, from whose summit, I am told, in the farthest distance can be seen the great water. Am I successful here, then sometime from the high mountain I shall behold the sea.

In war and storm I have rushed over half the world and have seen nothing but dust and stone; now, in the peace of solitude my eyes are opened to nature.

But—poachers, deserters, wild fellows whom one would not like to meet at night! Andreas, that will be no easy task.

PEACE OF THE PRIMEVAL FOREST

I already feel contented in the woods. The few people who see me going about in the forest gaze after me, unable to understand why I, a young fellow, should be roaming here in the wilderness. Ah yes, it is true, from day to day I am growing younger and am beginning to take a new lease of life. I am recovering. That comes from the fresh, primitive nature which surrounds me.

Romantic fancies I do not indulge in. As it is absorbed through the eye and the ear and all the senses, the much loved, the beautiful forest, so I like to enjoy it. The solitary one alone finds the forest; where many seek, it flees and only the trees remain. The woods are lost to them on account of the trees. Nay, still more, or, indeed, still less, they do not even see the trees, but only the wood which serves for timber or fuel and the twigs which may be used for brooms. Or they open the grey eyes of wisdom and say,—“That belongs to this class, or to that”—as if the pines and oaks, centuries old, were nothing but schoolboys.

I already feel contented in the woods. As long as I enjoy it, I do not wish to hear a single word of the purpose it serves, as man’s love of gain understands this purpose; I wish to be as childishly ignorant as if I had to-day just fallen from heaven upon the soft, cool moss in the shade.

A network of roots surrounds me, partly sucking the mother’s milk from the earth for its trees, partly seeking to entwine itself about the mossy bank and Andreas Erdmann sitting upon it. Softly I rest upon the arms of the network—upon mother-arms.

The brown trunk of the fir towers straight upward, stretching a rich garland of rugged branches in all directions. They have long grey beards, hairy, twisted mosses hanging from bough to bough. Well polished and dripping with balsam is the silvery, shimmering pine. But in the rough, furrowed, knotted bark of the larch-tree, with the mysterious signs and innumerable scars, is engraved the whole world’s legend, from that day when the exiled murderer Cain rested for the first time under the wild interwoven branches of the larch, up to the hour when another, also homeless, inhales the perfume of the tender, light-green needles.

It is dark, as in a Gothic temple; the pine-forest builds the pointed arch. Above rise the thousand little turrets of branches, between which the deep blue sky lights up the shady ground beneath, forming tiny mosaics. Or white clouds are sailing high above, trying to espy me,—me, a little worm in the woods,—and they waft a greeting to me—from—No, she is hidden by the hand of man under a baronial roof. Clouds, ye have not seen her—or have ye? Alas, no, they are drifted hither from distant deserts and seas.

There is a whispering, a rustling. The trees are speaking with one another. The forest dreams.

In all my life I have never seen such a remarkable woven mat as this variegated, wonderful network of mossy earth. It is a miniature forest, and in the bosom of its shade perhaps other beings rest, who like myself are watching the endless web of nature. Ah, how the ants hasten and run, embracing the smallest of small things with their slender arms, while endeavouring to poison everything hostile with their corroding fluid! A brilliant beetle has been contemptuously regarding the tiny, painstaking creatures, for it is endowed with wings. It now flutters haughtily upward, and glittering, circles away; suddenly it is ensnared and captured in a net. The spider, quiet and industrious, has been toiling long on this net; a veil, softer than any made on earth, has become the beetle’s shroud.

The little birds in the branches are also planning their works of art; where the boughs are thickest, they weave a cradle-basket from straws and twigs for their beloved young.

Can it then be true that a red thread spins itself on through all races of the human and animal kingdoms, down to the very smallest creature? Does everything then follow one and the same law, the acts of King Solomon on his throne of gold and those of the lazy, writhing worm under the stone? I should like very much to know.

Hush! yonder darts a rabbit; the crowned stag is making his way through the underbrush. Each shrub acts as mysteriously as if concealing a hundred beings and wood-spirits within itself. Sharply defined shadow-forms lie upon the ground, over which strings of light spin themselves. And the breath of the forest plays upon these strings.

I step out into the clearing. A trembling breeze ripples towards me, plays with my curls, and kisses my cheeks. Here are light-green furze bushes, with their clusters of little red berries, dark, gleaming bilberry, and the evergreen laurel of our Alps, for the worthy poet of the forest. The wood-bee is buzzing about among the bushes, and each leaf is a table spread for her.

And above this dim, perfumed field rises the charred trunk of a tree, its one bare branch lifted in defiance, threatening heaven for having once shattered its head with a lightning-stroke. And yonder towers a grey, cloven rock, in whose fissures the nimble lizard and the shimmering adder hide, and at whose feet flourish the serrated leaves of the fern, and the blue gentians, constantly waving greetings with their little caps.

Where there is no path, there is mine—where it is steepest, where the tangle of the alder-bushes and briars is thickest, where the dogberry grows, where the adder rustles in the yellow foliage of last year’s beech. The partridges are afraid of me and I of them, and my feet are the greatest misfortune of the ants, my advancing body the scourge of God to the spiders, whose house falls in ruins on this summer day.

It is a delight to penetrate thus into the wilderness, into the dim and uncertain; that which I anticipate attracts me more than that which I know; that which I hope for is dearer to me than that which I have. I stand on the edge of a green meadow, enclosed by young fir-woods. Close to me a deer springs from the thicket, bounds over the meadow, stopping on the other side, where it now stands in a listening attitude with head thrown high. Following an inborn instinct of man, I raise my juniper stick, lay it beside my cheek like a gun, aiming towards the breast of the deer. It looks over at me, well aware that a juniper stick does not go off. Finally it begins to graze. Laying the stick on the ground again, I walk farther out on the meadow. The deer raises its head quickly and I now expect it to dart away. But it does not hasten, it licks its back and scratches itself behind the ear, and again begins to eat.

“Little deer,” I say, “thou forgettest the respect due to mankind! Dost thou think me incapable of injuring thee? I wonder at that; here in the forest wander poachers and hunters. Thou dost not seem to be a novice, yet thou pretendest to be very inexperienced. Among us men, such behaviour would be called stupidity.”

The creature, gradually grazing in my direction, stops often to look at me, but tosses its head in fright, preparing for a spring, whenever hearing a noise from any other side. With ears constantly pricked up, its whole being is a picture of anxious watchfulness and readiness for flight.

“Thou knowest then,” I say, “that thou art in the land of the enemy? Not a moment safe from the shot? That is indeed cause for fear.”

I draw gradually nearer, the deer taking no heed.

“I am glad,” I say, “that I do not repel thee. It cannot be denied that I belong to those monsters who walk on two legs. But all bipeds are not dangerous. I, not at all. A short time ago I composed a few verses, which I should like to recite to thee.”

At this the creature, startled, leaps to one side.

“They would not have been long,” I say, sorry to have frightened the deer.

“It is not crafty of thee to hurt my feelings. The poem is written for my sweetheart. Somewhere lives one whom I love from the depths of my soul, but no one suspects it, nor does she herself. So I have composed these verses for her. But they must be forgotten again. How dost thou manage in such affairs?”

The animal, stepping two paces nearer to me, again begins to sniff. I now become quite bold.

“Beloved deer!” I continue, holding out my arms, “I cannot say how interesting thou art to me. If I had a rifle, I might shoot thee down. No, fear nothing from me, for thou breathest the same air as I, thy little eye beholds the same sunshine as mine—thy blood is as warm and as red as my own—why should I kill thee? But if I were hungry and had a rifle, then I should shoot thee after all, then nothing would help thee.”

In spite of all this, the little deer is coming nearer. I stand there motionless, and ten paces away is the creature looking at me. My sensations are most uncomfortable. There must be something wrong with a man with whom wild game associates.

“Thou art curious,” I say, “to see how I look near by. Well, observe me closely. These rags of linen and woollen stuff do not belong to me. This is only the outer covering. And if thou shouldst see us bare and naked as thyself, then all anxiety and fear of us would disappear. In the beginning we cannot shoot, cannot run as thou dost, cannot nourish ourselves from weeds, cannot dwell in the thicket. So pitiable are we. We—so it is said—would have been able to do it once, but in the same degree in which our reason has grown, have our bodies degenerated, become tender and sensitive, effeminate and weak. And if it continues in this way, all mankind will dissolve in spirit, which must also perish, as the flame dies when wick and oil are gone,—and you will take our place.

“I do not know,” I say, “whether thou art unconsciously searching for something which, when acquired, still does not satisfy. I do not know if it be hatred which animates thee, ambition which hunts and urges thee on, love which makes thee unhappy, pleasure which kills thee. With us it is so. Do I pity thee or dost thou pity me? Whatever thou hast, thou art able to enjoy in full measure, while with us the sweet pleasures of the heart become embittered by the hardness and pitilessness of reason and prejudice. Our feeling degenerates into thought, and that is our misfortune. But after all, thou wouldst willingly exchange places? No, thou art not advanced enough to be discontented. Thy fear is the hunter, as ours is man. Our own kind threaten us with the greatest dangers. Hast thou already seen the latest weekly journal? Ah, thou dost not read leaves, thou eatest them, which is far more wholesome, only beware of newspaper leaves, they are poisonous. They should not be so, but they suck the venom from the ground upon which they stand, from the air that blows around them, from the times which they serve. Thank God, they do not grow in the Winkel forest. There grows the sorrel, and that is something for thee, and the mushroom, which is something for me. For the rest, my little deer, how long shall we stand here? How goes eating from the hand?”

I pull some grass from the ground, an occupation which the deer follows with the eye of a connoisseur.

A shot is fired. A short whizzing through the air, the deer makes one high bound—and with the utmost display of its speed, runs across the meadow straight into the thicket.

In the near branches the sulphurous smoke slowly disappears. I hasten to look for the poacher, to deliver him up to justice because he has fired, and to beg mercy for him because he has not hit. Seeing neither the poacher nor the deer, I am furious with the thought that the creature might take me for the guilty one, for the betrayer, or even for the assassin, and in his eyes I wish to be neither a bad friend nor a bad protector.

But what does it all amount to? Such enthusiasm is not enduring; in the late autumn, when, as I hope, the roast venison will appear upon my table, the friendly feelings will surely reawaken, however they will not come from the heart, but from the stomach.

The triumphant roaring of a bull or the bells and bleating of a goat is now heard. The shepherd-boy comes skipping by. He will have nothing to do with the juniper-bushes; the thorns prick, the blueberries are bitter. He picks strawberries into his cap, or, what he likes better, into his mouth. Then, plucking the narrow pointed leaf of the goat-majoram he carries it to his lips, and through it brings forth a whistle which re-echoes far away on the slopes and which other shepherd-lads in the distance give back to him. To the little folks of the woods this is the sign of brotherhood. Through the raspberry-bushes wriggles the ant-grubber, searching for the resinous kernels in the ant-hills from which to prepare the incense, that wonderful grain whose smoky veil enchants the eye of mortals, so that they fall before the sacrificial bread and see the Lord.

On the ridge beside the purple erica, under the blackberry leaves, flourishes the sweet-root; that is a toothsome spice for the shepherd-boy, and the herdswoman also likes to nibble it, that she may have a ringing voice for yodling on the Alm. The herdswoman, I notice, is often affected in a singular manner; surely she has many, yes, a great many words upon her tongue, but the right one for her heart’s desire is not among them; she therefore expresses it in another way and sings a song without words which in this region, as far as it is heard, is called the Jodel.

I proceed down through a defile torn away by the wild torrents of the Kar. Trees and bushes arch over it, forming an arbour. A cool breeze fans me as I stand upon the shady bank of a forest lake, enclosed by dark walls and slender brown trunks of the primeval forest. A perfect stillness rests upon the water. The stray leaf of a beech or an oak rustles toward me. I hear that eternal murmuring of deepest silence. A little bell somewhere in space, we know not if on the earth below or in the starry heaven above, is constantly calling us. And in a quiet hour our soul catches the familiar sound and longs,—and longs.

Peace of the primeval forest, thou still, thou holy refuge of the orphaned, the deserted, the pursued and world-weary; thou only Eden which remains for the unhappy!

Listen, Andreas! Dost thou hear the sound and echo of the song without words? That is the shepherd’s hymn. Dost thou also hear the distant hammering and reverberating? That is the woodsman with the axe—the angel with the sword.

WITH THE HERDSMEN

The earliest people were the herdsmen. They are the most harmless that one meets in these wooded hills. So I have begun with them.

And I have already learned something of pastoral life. With the exception of the couple up in the Miesenbach hut, none of them live at home; the herdsmen really have no homes, they are wanderers. They spend the winter in the lower, outlying districts, dwelling in the farmyards to which the herds belong. They eat with the people and sleep with the cows and goats. In the spring-time, when the freshets are over and the maple blossoms are peeping forth from their green sheaves toward heaven to see if the swallows are not already there, the cattle are taken from the stalls and led by the herdsman to the Alm. The cows are bedecked with tinkling bells, the calves and steers with green wreaths, such as the people wear at the feast of Corpus Christi. In the procession to the Alm, when the young people and cattle walk together, the ceremony of crowning with wreaths is conducted with great propriety; but when, after many honeymoons upon the airy heights, the cattle return to the valley in the late autumn with fresh wreaths, the garland of the herdswoman does not always remain green in her hair. On the Alm there is much sun and little shade, and the Alm-boy must bring the fresh water a long distance—then nothing withers more easily than such a tender nosegay in the curly locks.

In the lovely summer-time these people lead a good and happy life upon the hills and I—truly and by my faith, I am good and happy with them. Sorrow and woe are like hot-house plants, they will not flourish in the fresh Alpine air. Even the old keeper of oxen, usually so surly, is constantly heard singing and piping his flute.

Within the herdsman’s hut everything is well arranged and conveniently near at hand. By the hearth sits Domesticity in front of the fire and the brown jugs, and before the shaky table kneels Religion at the crudely ornamented Hausaltar. And where the bedstead stands, the Lord Himself would have been unable to put anything better. The bed is made from rough boards, upholstered with moss and rushes—it must be like that if the young woman of the Alm is to dream happily therein. In the next room are the buckets and pitchers, and here the milk and butter business is carried on, the profits of which are honestly delivered to the owner of the herd.

The whole household is shut in by four wooden walls, on which the Alm woman hears at night the little gold man knocking; this is the token of the fulfilment of her most secret heart’s desire. I did not like to tell the credulous Aga that I thought the little gold man might be an industrious wood-worm. What in heaven’s name would a wood-worm have to do with her heart’s desires? But these will be fulfilled all the same: the simple folk about here wish for nothing which cannot be attained. And the maid in the hut, as well as the shepherd-boy and the herd in the stall, sleep with an easy conscience.

In the morning the bright sun peeps through the window, calling, “Time to be up!” Now the herdswoman goes with the bucket into the stall, where between four legs flow the little white fountains of milk and butter. The fire on the hearth is ready for the milk and the herdsman is waiting for the soup. He yodles and shouts, and so the time passes. But Berthold manages in the simplest way; he lays himself under the belly of the cow and drinks his breakfast directly from the udder.

It was with Berthold and Aga in the Miesenbach hut that I made my observations. After the morning soup Aga takes the basket on her back and descends toward the grazing meadows of the Thalmulde, that like a careful mistress she may prepare the table for her four-footed menials. The herd’s meal lasts the whole day; for in the early morning Berthold has already led them down to the pastures wet with dew.

Once in such an hour I listened to Aga. She was trilling and singing, and these are the things I like to record.

“If the Winkel brook were milk,
  And the Winkel vale were beef as well,
And the hills were all of butter,
  That were a feast, my lad, to tell.”

Berthold hearing it does not reflect long; a song so grossly material calls for one still more material. Standing upon the wall, he sings to the maid:

“If thy red hair were gold,
  Of thalers full thy throat,
Thy bodice stuffed with diamonds,
  Upon thee I would dote.”

And then she:

“Thy fingers would burn for the thalers,
  The jewels thou wouldst embrace,
But the golden hair were much too fine
  For thy rough and bearded face.”

Oh, they do not remain in one another’s debt; they know how to tease. But how does it happen that in the forest-land grow fewer and less appropriate expressions for love and tenderness than for jesting and fun? If love down in the valleys is not exactly communicative, up here with the firs and little cabbage-roses it is as dumb as fish in water. The kiss is not as customary here as in other places. It is, I should say, as if the warm blood did not take the time to mount to the lips, when there is so much to do elsewhere. Everything expresses itself in the arms, and when a love-sick lad knows no other way of showing his feelings, he seizes his maiden, as the miller does a sack of grain, and swings her high in the air, at the same time giving a shout that verily tears the clouds asunder.

Berthold does it not a whit differently. They are two poor young people, left to themselves on the lonely Alpine heights. What is there to do? Alas! alas! nothing, I think, for me as yet.

WITH THE WOOD-DEVILS

In this wilderness there are trades of which I had no idea. The people literally dig their bread out of the earth and stones. They scrape it from the trees, and by the many-sided resources of their wit force it out of inedible fruits. How strange that man should know so well how to utilise everything! But has he already done so? And was the necessity there before the means were discovered, or was it the result of the things obtained? If the latter were the case, I should consider the thousand acquisitions as no gain.

The starved or daring wood-devils hold closer communication with the mass of mankind outside than one would suppose, and than they themselves perhaps imagine. Yet after all they know it well enough. For example, there is the root-digger. His fustian jacket reaches to the calves of his legs; his hat is a veritable family roof, but in places it is already breaking and full of holes. One knows him at once from afar. He climbs around among the rocks and digs out the aromatic roots with his crooked iron puncheon. He then sometimes sings the little song:

“When I uproot the spikenard here,
That grows upon the Alm,
I like to think of the women-folk.—
Canst thou guess where the spices go?
To Turkey land, that the women-folk,
A sweeter perfume may receive.
In Turkey land, the women-folk.”

I do not yet know if it be true that spikenard travels from here over to Turkey. But these people believe it and so it is truth to them. The proud assertion of the root-digger, that he is sending a sweeter perfume to the woman’s world in the Orient, is contested.

Yonder upon the cliff stands an old comrade, who, hearing the song, unfastens the brass clasp of his jacket, and retorts:

“That thou ’rt always thinking
Of the Turkish women-folk,
O Lota, is well-known!
Go rather and perfume thyself
With spikenard on the Alm,
It might not do thee any harm.”

Thus they tease one another, and that is their harmless side. But the wood-devil has his cloven foot. The genuine man of the woods has a double-barrelled shot-gun; one barrel is called Gemsennoth (Danger to the chamois), the other Jägertod (Death to the hunter). If he could write, he would engrave these names upon the steel with his crooked knife; but he keeps it in his mind, that about Gemsennoth and Jägertod.

He would have given up the digging long ago, to lead solely a poacher’s life, but he imagines that sometime he is going to find a buried treasure under the stones. Digging for treasures, gold and diamonds under the ground, that he has heard in fairy-tales and can never forget.

Gold and diamonds under the ground! Treasure-digging! The fairy-tale is right; the root-digger is right; the ploughman is right; the miner is right. But the treasure-digger is not right.

Of one thing I am careful, that is, not to offend the root-digger, the pitch-scraper, or the ant-grubber. These are the people who are said to cause the bad weather, which is all devils’ work, and since they live in the forests, thence the many hard storms in the wooded and Alpine regions. But how they manage that the atoms of dew condense into water, that the drops freeze into bits of ice, that the bits of ice become heavy hail-stones, that flaming darts of lightning hiss through the night, and that the mighty thunder rolls, until at last it all bursts upon the trembling men and beasts of the earth—how they manage that, must be a profound secret of these wild fellows which I have not been able to discover.

It is a fearful delusion of these people, when they think themselves able to perform deeds which are beyond human power, while neglecting that by which they might accomplish something great.—However, in the world outside, other mistakes occur, still more harmful because made by men of superior wisdom and with greater resources than here. Glorious, O mankind, is thy progress, but with thy monstrous prejudices art thou still very incomplete!

Up among the hills is a glen called the Wolfsgrube. I recently visited this place, arriving there just in time to witness the burial of a man, who had been neither root-digger, ant-grubber, pitch-scraper, brandy-distiller, nor poacher, but the most extraordinary wood-devil.

He had never worked, but had earned his bread by eating. He was called “the Gormand”; I think he had no other name. He was a human wreck, although physically very strong. His hair had become a hopelessly tangled mat with sweat and resin; so he had no need of a hat. His beard resembled dried pine-needles. His broad and powerful chest was as though spun over with a tenfold spider’s web, thus saving a doublet. An entire horny skin had formed itself upon his bulky feet, making shoes superfluous. Almost a terrible sight! I met him a few days ago in the Winkel. Seeing me, he snatched a handful of sand from the ground, offering to swallow it for a small remuneration. He often went to the surrounding villages on church-festival days to exhibit his tricks before the people. He did not consume tow and ribbons and that sort of thing, as jugglers usually do, but cloth, leather, and bits of glass. He has even been known to swallow rusty shoe-nails. His favourite repast was an old boot or felt hat, torn into bits and prepared with oil and vinegar. That paid him well, and his purse, like his stomach, had a good digestion. “For us such food would not be good,” said Rhyme-Rüpel, “though a little drink of Schnapps or wine might cut the pebbles very fine.” Day in, day out, he performed this feat; but everything has an end, Easter Sunday as well as Good Friday. He was sitting before his glass of toddy in Kranabethannes’ hut, saying in his arrogant way, “Eat your black bread yourself, Hannes; I ’ll drink the brandy and take a bite of the glass with it.” Just then an old root-digger crawled out from a dark corner of the hearth: “Despise the black bread, do you? You!” At which the Gormand retorted: “Get out, root-digger; I ’ll eat you and the yoke on your back!” The old man then drew forth a small root, saying, “Here ’s something, you rascal, that’s a little stronger than you are.” “Bring it on!” screamed the Gormand, seizing the root and thrusting it down his throat. “You ’re done for!” chuckled the old man, and he disappeared into the forest. Suddenly springing up, the Gormand staggered out of the house and fell upon the grass, stone-dead. The meaning of it all was now plain. No one knew the old root-digger—he was the devil.

Half-fact, half-legend, so the superstitious people interpreted and related it to me. And they would not bury the man in the Holdenschlag churchyard. In the marshy ground of the Wolfsgrube, where only the rushes grow and wave their little woolly flags, they made the grave. Winding the body in thick fir-boughs, they shoved it with a pole, until it rolled into its final resting-place.

At the same time a little troop of worshippers came over the heath through the Wolfsgrube. They had been in a defile in the high mountains where a cross is said to be standing among the rocks. The little company paused before the grave, repeating the Lord’s prayer for the dead man. Then suddenly a swarthy woman, a charcoal-burner, cried out: “You miserable wretches, your pious prayers will be as useful to that man as dry clothes to a fish in water. He ’s already yonder in torment, for he ’s the eater of broken glass!”

“The holy Lord’s prayer will serve afterwards for our live-stock at home!” murmured the worshippers as they walked away.

A pale, black-haired man, with a melancholy face though restless bearing, still remained standing beside the grave. Gazing into it, with a trembling hand he threw a clump of earth upon the form wrapped in the green travelling-dress and, looking about him, said: “We will cover him with earth nevertheless. The devil has not taken him because of his good appetite; and his heart may have been no worse than his stomach.”

This was the funeral sermon. And then a few men came and shovelled earth into the grave.

Later I again met the sad, pale man, whom they call the Einspanig. “Can you tell me something,” I asked, “about the eater of broken glass? It is really a strange, weird tale.”

“Strange and weird is the whole woodland,” he answered; “a better digestion than ours, such a son of the wilderness may have. And superstition is the intellectual life of these people.” With these words he turned and quickly stumbled away.

What, old man, art thou not thyself a son of the wilderness? Thou art truly strange and weird enough. The Einspanig, “The Lone One,” they call him; of his history they know nothing.

I have also made the acquaintance of the pitch-maker. He is a very peculiar fellow. One can scent him from afar and see him glistening through the thicket. The hatchet glistens with which he scrapes the resin from the trees, and the grappling-iron glistens, by means of which he climbs like a wild-cat up the smooth trunks to reap a harvest from their tops, or to make an incision for the resin to flow out later on. And the leather trousers glisten, and the fustian jacket, covered with pitch, and the blade of the long knife at his side—and finally one sees his black, glistening eye. If a blossom or a falling pine-needle grazes him, it sticks to his arm, to his hair, to his beard. If a fly or a butterfly is flitting about, or a spider, swinging from its web, the little insect remains clinging to him; and his dress is gaily decorated with tiny creatures from the plant and animal kingdom when in the darkness of the forest or at evening he returns home to his hermitage. The pitch-maker wounds the trees seriously, at last killing them, and the primeval forest has succumbed to the destruction. He has crippled the old pines and firs, and they now stretch out their long arms after him, as if desiring to strike down their deadly enemy.

By a process of evaporation, the pitch-maker prepares turpentine and other oils such as are used in the forest regions for every conceivable malady. I often visit these distilleries, watching the black mass boil and bubble, until it is put into closed earthen receptacles, from which the valuable contents are drawn through slender tubes into kegs and bottles. Packing these in a large basket, the man peddles them from house to house. The wood-cutter buys pitch-oil for every injury which he may receive in his battle with the forest. The charcoal-burner buys it for burns; the brandy-distiller for his casks. The root-digger buys for sprains and colic, the last of which he contracts from so much uncooked food. The small peasant farther out buys pitch-oil for his whole household and cattle, as a remedy against every ill.

O thou pitch-oil man! A tiny worm has been gnawing long at my heart—might it not be destroyed with thy gall-bitter oil?

In the pitch-maker’s hut it is unsafe to sit down, for one would stick fast. And then the little unwashed, tousled children would come and clamber upon one’s neck until there would be no escape.

The pitch-maker’s dwelling is simple enough. Underneath is the bare earth; above, the bark-shingled roof; while the walls are of rough logs, stopped up with moss. The uneven hearth serves at the same time as a table. Under the bedstead is the storehouse for potatoes, mushrooms, and wild pears. The worm-eaten wardrobe is the revered object in the house; it guards the sacred souvenirs of the forefathers, the baptismal gifts of the children, and the rain-coat of the pitch-maker when not in use. The windows have hardly enough glass to have satisfied the appetite of the Gormand. “Besides,” as the pitch-maker says, “rags and straw paper are as good as glass panes, if one cannot show a clean face through them.” Behind the wardrobe hangs the gun. If my lord, the hunter, on one of his visits, should happen to discover it, it is all right—a gun is a necessity, for there are wolves in the woods. If he does not see it, so much the better. It is the same with the pitch-maker’s housekeeper; seeing her, one is compelled to acknowledge that the spring-time of life will return no more to one in the fortieth year; that, as the proverb says, a wen on the throat is better than a hole; that one-eyed is not blind, and that a little crookedness in the legs is neither to be ashamed nor boasted of. If one does not see her, so much the better.

But as I have often noticed, to many a pitch-maker clings a young wife. Country wenches are sometimes very different from city maids. The latter are usually well pleased when their lovers are white and delicate, slender, docile, and amorous as doves. The country lass on the contrary prefers one who is hard, rough, and bristly, angular and wild. If a girl has a choice between one who cheerfully darns stockings for her and one who thunders at her with every word—then she takes the thunderer. For after all she has him in her power. How does the song go which the pitch-maker likes so well to sing?

“For the pitch I have my axe,
  For the hare I ‘ve gun and ball,
For the hunter two stout fists,
  For the wench I ’ve nothing at all.
‘That,’ she says, ’is far too little.’
  So she drives me out the door;
Then I go and flog the hunter
  Till he troubles me no more.”

It may not be poetical,—however, the man who occasionally sings such a song does not harm the hunter. He who goes about with gloomy thoughts sings no merry song.

Among the wood-devils, the most cordial and, according to my judgment, the most dangerous, is the brandy-distiller. He wears finer cloth than the others and shaves his beard every week. He always carries about with him a little flask, affably treating each person who comes in his way. Whoever drinks is ruined, and follows him to the tavern.

The brandy-distiller reaps a double harvest; first the red berries from the mountain-ash, from the hop, from the sweet-broom, from everything that here produces fruit. He believes in the Spirit of Nature, that lives in all created things, and conjures it out of the fruits of the forest and, like the magician in the fairy-tale, into the bottle and, putting the stopple in quickly, imprisons it there. His distillery is a magic circle under a high, gloomy pine, a circle like that which the spider draws and weaves. Soon a few flies are there, wriggling in the net. The woods-people, as they go about, or to and from their work, are at last enticed into the tavern—these are the flies of the two-legged spider, and from them the brandy-distiller now reaps his second harvest.

Each man is advised by his wife to avoid the road by “the Pine,” it is so dark and rough, as well as being longer than any other. The man appears to be convinced, and besides he has nothing to call him there,—but health is such an uncertain thing, and as he walks along he is suddenly attacked by a pressure in the throat, followed by a most distressing colic. Having no pitch-oil with him, he knows but one remedy and—he takes the road by “the Pine.” “The first little glass,” says Rüpel, “soothes the smart; the second glass makes warm the heart; the third glass makes it still more warm; one’s purse by the fourth will receive no harm; at the fifth, the man wishes to stretch his limbs; at the sixth, the pines sway and his poor head swims; at the seventh, his body is all aglow; at the eighth, to his wife he longs to go.”

But stumbling homewards, the good man swears at the “bad” wife who is coming to meet him without a light through this ghastly fog; and when finally, his hat awry and jammed low on his forehead, he tumbles into the hut, the woman knows what beatings she has already borne and may receive again, if she does not hasten and escape into the garret or some safe place.

My voyages of discovery have cheered me more than I should have thought possible. A sad fate hangs over this little people, but this fate sometimes makes an unspeakably droll face. Besides I do not consider these foresters so utterly depraved and wretched. They are neglected and uncouth. Perhaps something might be made of them; but first the leaven must be added.

The race will not die out so easily. Right here in the damp, dark forest-land the little ones flourish like mushrooms. The youngsters follow the path of their elders and carry the grappling-iron for roots, or the herdsman’s staff, or the hatchet for pitch, or the axe for wood.

But, according to the reports made to the priest in Holdenschlag, the forest children are all girls. The boys are mostly christened with the water of the woods; they are recorded in no parish-register, that they may remain unnoticed outside by the bailiffs and omitted from the military list. The men here say that the government and whatever belongs to it costs them more than it would be worth to them, and they will renounce it. That may be all true, but the government does not renounce the healthy Winkelstegers.

The girls also, when they are somewhat fledged, soon take up ant- and root-digging, gathering herbs, and they know of a market for everything; they pick strawberries and hops and the fruit of the juniper for the brandy-distillers. And the little boys, still too young to look after themselves, already help with the brandy-drinking.

A short time ago I watched a troop of children. They are playing under a larch-tree. The fallen larch-cones are their stags and roes, which they are pretending to feed with green brushwood. Others run about playing “Hide and Seek” behind the bushes, “Holding Salt,” “Driving out Hawks,” “Going to Heaven and Hell,” and whatever all the tricks and games are called. It is pleasant to watch them; to be sure they are all half naked, but they have well-formed and healthy limbs, and their games are more childishly gay than any which I have ever seen other children play. This is the vulnerable spot of the horny Siegfried, who is here called Waldteufel.

Smiling at the little ones under the larch-tree, I try after a while to mingle with them in their games, but they draw back shyly, only a few keeping near me; but when I attempt to get the better of them in a race or game of tag, then they all join in. And soon I am a good and welcome friend in the mad, whirling circle of these young people. I prattle many things to them, but more often I let them talk to me. I go to school to the children to learn the schoolmaster’s art.

The forest people do not allow themselves to be drawn up by force; he who would win them for higher things must descend quite to them, must lead them up arm in arm and indeed by a long, circuitous route.

IN THE FELSENTHAL

Below the slopes of the fore-alps and the cliffs of the Hochzahn with its chain of glaciers, the wooded hills extend on and on toward the west. Seen from above they lie there like a dark-blue sea, concealing in their depths the everlasting shadows and the strange people.

A day’s journey from the valley of the Winkel toward the west, far below the last hut, is a place where, according to the legend, the world is fastened in with boards.

It were better said, walled in with stones; deep fissured precipices shut off the forest-land and here begin the Alps, where the rocky boulders no longer lie or lean, but soar straight up into the sky. A sea of snow and ice with crags, about which hover everlasting mists, extends endlessly, it is said, over the giant strongholds above, which in olden times guarded an Eden now turned to stone. Thus the legend. Strange that this wonderful dream of a lost paradise yet to be regained should dawn in the hearts of all people and nations!

These foresters will not believe that on the other side of the Alps there are again regions inhabited by man. Only one old, shy, blinking charcoal-burner repeats the story told him by his grandfather, that over there were human beings, who wore such high pointed hats that they could not walk about on the mountains in the evening without knocking down the stars. So the Lord God was obliged to carefully draw down the clouds every night in order to keep a single star in heaven. The rogue meant the pointed hats of the Tyrolese.

In this mountain glen are a number of places held in ill repute. Here many a dead chamois-hunter has been found, shot through the breast by a ball of lead. There is also a legend that a monster, which keeps watch over an inexhaustible treasure of diamonds in the mountains, sometimes bursts forth from one of the numerous rocky caverns. If the forest-land endures a while longer, then a hero is expected to come and slay the beast and recover the treasure. Up to the present such a one has not appeared. Ah, if I could give this monster its true name!

The region is adapted to the gloomy myths. It is a dead valley in which no little finch will sing, no wild pigeon coo, no woodpecker chatter, in which loneliness itself has fallen asleep. Upon the grey moss-covered ground piles of rock lie about, just as they have been broken from the high cliff. Here and there a bold little fir-tree has climbed up on one of these grey, weather-beaten boulders and proudly looks about, thinking itself now more fortunate than the other half-dead trees on the sandy soil below. It will not be long before it too will perish from hunger and thirst, and will fall from the barren rock. Here the forest cannot flourish, and if a straight and slender fir shoots up anywhere, its days are numbered. A storm-wind suddenly comes rushing down from the rocky defile and almost gently lays the young tree, together with its broken roots, upon the ground.

The Scotch fir alone is still courageous; it climbs the steep sides between the precipices to discover how it looks up there with the Edelweiss, with the Alpine roses, with the chamois, and how far it is yet to the snow. But the good Scotch fir is no daughter of the Alps; soon a dizziness seizes it, and, frightened, it crouches down and crawls painfully upon its knees, with its twisted, crippled arms always reaching out and clutching something, the little heads of the cones stretching themselves upward in curiosity, until finally it comes out into the damp veil of mist and aimlessly wanders about among the stones.

Upon one of the fallen rocks of this remotest valley in the forest stands a cross. It is very clumsily made out of two rough pieces of wood; in places the bark is still clinging to it. Silent it stands there in the barren waste; it is like the first message concerning the Redeemer of the world, which in olden times the holy Boniface made from the trees of the forest and set up in the German wilderness.

I have often asked the meaning of this cross. Since time immemorial it has stood upon the rock, and no man can say who placed it there. According to the legend it was never placed there. Every thousand years a little bird flew into the forest, bringing a seed of grain from unknown lands. Previously it was not known what had become of the seeds, whether they had been lost, or whether the poisonous plant with the blue berries, or the thorn-bush with the white rose, or something else, evil or good, had sprung from them. But when the bird last appeared it laid the seed upon the rock in the Felsenthal, and from it sprang the cross. Sometimes one goes there to pray before it; the prayer has often brought a blessing at once, but often a misfortune has followed it. So it is uncertain whether the cross is for weal or woe. The Einspanig is the most frequently seen in the Felsenthal, and here he performs his devotions before the symbol; but it is also uncertain whether the Einspanig is good or evil.

After many days of wandering I returned once more to my house in the Winkel, much puzzled in my mind about the cross in the Felsenthal and the Einspanig. I learned a little concerning the latter on reaching home.

I was surprised to find my housekeeper, usually so good-natured, quite irritable to-day. It appears that seeing the Einspanig passing, the woman, who happened to look out at that moment, thought to herself, “Oh, how I should like to gossip a little with this queer man, and find out something about him.” And as he accidentally turned his face toward the door, she cordially invited him to enter and rest a little on the bench. On his accepting her invitation, she hastily brought him bread and milk, and in her own peculiar way asked, “Good man of God, where do you then come from?”

“Down from the Felsenthal,” was the answer.

“Ihr Närrchen!” cried the woman, “you don’t mean that horrible place! Up there in the Felsenthal the world is fastened in with boards.”

The Einspanig then replied quietly: “Nowhere is the world fastened in with boards. The mountains stretch far, far back behind the Hochzahn, then comes the hilly country, then the plains, then the water which extends many thousand miles, then land again with mountains and valleys and little hills, and again water, and again land and water and land and land——”

Interrupting him here, the woman cried, “Mein Gott, Einspanig, how much farther then?”

“As far as home, into our country, into our forest, into the Winkel, into the Felsenthal. Worthy woman, if God should give you wings and you should fly away toward the setting sun and on and always on, following your nose and the sun, then one day you would come flying from where the sun rises toward your peaceful house.”

“Oh, you humbug!” cried the woman, “go tell your tales to someone else; I am the Winkel-warden’s wife. I ’ll give you the milk and with it the honest opinion of old people: Somewhere there is a place where the world is fastened in with boards. That is the old faith, and therein will I live and die.”

“Woman, all honour to your old faith!” replied the Einspanig, “but I have already travelled the road toward the setting sun and back here from the rising sun.”

These words seemed to have thoroughly embittered her. “O Du Fabelhans!” she screamed, “the devil has set his mark upon you.” And then shaking his head the man walked away.

The good woman must have found it hard waiting for me to give further vent to her feelings. As I approached the house she called to me over the fence: “By my troth! By my troth! What kind of people there are upon God’s dear earth, to be sure! Now they do not even believe in the end of the world! But I say: Our Lord God has made it all right, and I ’ll stick to my old faith, and the world is fastened in with boards!”

“Of course, of course,” I acknowledged, as I climbed over the board fence. “Quite right—fastened in with boards!”

And so we will cling to the old faith.

WITH THE WOOD-CUTTERS

Alas, that the forest also should have its enemies—the silent, unending forest, as it stretches over hill and vale—lying there, boundless, green and dark, and farther on, dimly blue in the sunny horizon.

What a beautiful rustling, murmuring, echoing, living wall, protecting all within it from the wild discord without! But—the peace of the woods is dead.

In the forest the wind roars, striking off the joyfully waving arm of many a young pine, breaking the neck of many a daring giant. And in the depths, rushing and foaming in white frothy flakes—like a gathering storm—is the Wildbach, which washes, digs, and gnaws the earth away from the roots, ever deeper and deeper, until at last the mighty tree is almost standing in the air, only supporting itself above by resting its strong arms upon its neighbours, and finally plunging into the grave, which the water has mischievously been digging for it,—that water which the tree has fed with its falling dew, protected with its thick branches from the thirst of the wind and guarded with its shade from the consuming kiss of the sun. And the woodpecker pecks the bark in the airy tree-top, while the sharp-toothed wheel of time revolves constantly, and the chips fly—in the spring as blossoms, in the autumn as withered needles and leaves.

It is eternally ending and in the end are always the germs of beginning.

Then man comes for the first time with his rage for destruction. The blows and strokes resound, the saw buzzes, the axe is heard upon the iron wedge in the dark valley,—if you look from above over the silent sea of trees, you do not dream which one it concerns.

But the axe and the wedge pierce deeper and deeper; then the tree, a century old, shakes its lofty head, not in the least comprehending what the little man below there wants, the droll, tiny creature—it cannot understand and again shakes its head. Then comes the thrust through its heart; it cracks, snaps, and now the giant totters and bends; whizzing and whistling in an immense circle, it falls with a wild crash to the earth. There is an empty space in the air, the forest has a gap. A hundred spring-times have borne it up with their love and gentleness; now it is dead, and the world exists and also remains intact without it—the living tree.

Silent stand the two or three men, supporting themselves upon the handles of their axes, and gaze upon their sacrifice. They do not mourn, they do not exult, a cruel indifference rests upon their rough, sunburnt features; their very faces and hands resemble the fir bark. Filling their pipes, they sharpen the hatchets and return to work. They chop the branches from the fallen trunk, they shave off the bark with a broad knife, cutting it perhaps into cord-lengths, and now the proud tree lies there transformed into bare logs.

These are converted into charcoal, which is forwarded to the foundries in the outlying regions. The beeches and maples and other deciduous trees are usually left standing until they inwardly decay and fall to the ground. Upon the mouldering trunks appear fungous growths, and from these the pitch-maker or the root-digger prepares the tinder, by hammering them flat and steeping them in saltpetre.

The wood-cutter has no thought for the beauty of the wilderness. To him the forest is nothing more than a hostile shelter from which he must wrest bread and existence with the gleaming axe. And what a long day’s work it is from early morning until twilight, with but a single hour’s rest at noon! While the wood-devil is his own master, the woodcutter is the slave of others. As for his food, the wood-cutter is a being who nourishes himself from plants, unless he be a genuine poacher, who is shrewd enough to avoid being captured. However, he luxuriates in imagination and likes to name his flour-dumplings after the animals of the forest. So for breakfast, dinner, and supper he always eats venison, foxes, sparrows, or whatever he christens his meal-cakes. One Friday a young man invited me to a “Venison.” Ah, I think, he does not keep Fast Day,—he is certainly one of the Evangelicals who was left in the Alps after the peasant wars. But the “Venison” proved to be harmless little meal-cakes.

Eighteen groschen wages for a day’s work,—that is indeed prosperity; from it many a woodsman has bought himself a little house and goat, and supported a wife and troop of children. So at last he has his own hearth, and in addition to the meal-cakes a rich soup of goat’s milk.

However, the expenses of the forest cabin are not very great. Fortunately not much is required of the good fathers of families.

“Man can live as he likes,
  If lucky he be,—
For the children some bread,
  Tobacco for me”

is the song of the forest householder.

But others, and indeed the most of them, drown their earnings in brandy, thus forfeiting the few comforts which their unambitious natures demand. Such spendthrifts live together by the dozen in a single hut, cooking their dinner at a common hearth which is in the middle of the cabin. Along the walls are spread the straw beds.

In each hut they have a Goggen and a Thomerl; the first is a wooden frame on the hearth, which holds the frying-pan over the fire—there are often half a dozen set up around the flames. The second is a man, who, however, may be called Hansl or Lippl, or whatever he likes, but who usually has a massive head, high shoulders, and short feet, hands hanging down to his knees, and a vacant smile continually upon his face. He is chambermaid, kitchen-boy, wood- and water-carrier, at the same time goatherd, butt for empty jokes and—the honour of the house.

Furthermore, in each woodman’s hut, in some one of the corners, or under some board, rifles are always concealed.

The working-day garb of the wood-cutter has no striking characteristics; it consists of a combination of tattered fustian, dull-coloured knitted wool, and a horny leather hide, everything more or less sticky with resin and almost entirely hiding the form beneath. But the badge is the high, yellowish-green hat with the tuft of feathers. The feather tuft is most important, for that is the mark of some poaching adventure, love affair, or savage broil. Occasionally these people go outside to the more distant places to celebrate the Kirmess—and this is a necessity to them, as here there are no Sundays, indeed the very heart of Sunday—the church itself—is missing.

At these feasts the rough woods-people wear dress-coats and tall hats,—one would hardly believe it. But the coat is of coarse fustian edged with green; miniature trees, cut out of the same green material, decorate the sleeves and back above the coat-tails; large brass buttons glisten in the distance, and a high standing collar reaches to the head, which is covered by the tall hat, broad brimmed and with flaring crown. This is made from rough hair, with a wide green band and shining brass buckle.

Even into the wilderness of the Alps the foreign fashions have penetrated!

For the most part they are good-hearted people; but if irritated they can become savage past all belief. Their eyes, although deep-set, are bright and sparkling. Kindness is clearly read there as well as quickness of temper.

But they are pious, suspiciously pious. Each one has his flask of holy water and tells his beads, with the parenthesis, “Bless all poor souls in purgatory, and help us to find the money and goods so uselessly buried in the ground.” And each has seen at least one ghost in his life.

According to my observation a bloody fight seems to be quite an ordinary occurrence with these people, and a death-blow no rarity. On the other hand, thefts are never committed.

The wood-cutter is born under the tree; his father places, one might almost say, the axe-handle in his hand before the spoon, and instead of the nursing-bottle the little one grasps after the tobacco-pouch. He who is unable to buy tobacco makes it for himself from beech leaves.

A remarkable amiability is not a native trait of these people. They scarcely know peaceful joy; they strive for noisy pleasure. They are not even sensitive to pain. If one of them drives the sharp axe into his leg he merely says it tickles him a little. But in a few days all is healed again. And if a man loses a finger, it is a misfortune only because of the inconvenience in lighting his pipe.

An old setter of broken bones and an extractor of teeth form the entire medical faculty, while pine-resin and pitch-oil are the only drugs used in this shadowy wood-world.

When these people go away homesickness is their greatest woe. The homeless ones homesick? Their real trouble is a longing for the forest hills where they have once passed a portion of their lives.

BLACK MATHES

In the Hinter Winkel stands the haunted hut. A short time ago I was there to see Mathes the fighter, a hard, rough-appearing man, although small and thin. He was lying stretched upon a bed of moss, his arm and head being bound in rags. He was badly hurt.

The windows of the hut were covered with bits of cloth; the sufferer could not bear the light. His wife, young and amiable, but grieving piteously, was kneeling beside him, moistening his forehead with apple vinegar. His eyes stared at her almost lifelessly, but about his mouth played a smile, showing the snow-white teeth. A strong odour of pitch-oil filled the room.

As I entered, a pale, black-haired boy and a bright-eyed little maid were cowering at his feet, playing with bits of moss.

“That is to be a garden,” said the girl, “and there I am going to plant roses!”

The boy was carving a cross out of a small piece of wood, and he cried: “Father, now I know what I am making; it ’s the Holdenschlag graveyard!”

The mother in alarm reproved the children for their noise; but Mathes said: “Oh, never mind; I ’ll soon be in the graveyard myself. But, one thing, wife, don’t let Lazarus’s temper pass unheeded. For God’s sake, don’t do that! Thou hast nothing to say? Thou wilt not follow my advice? Dost thou perhaps know better than I? Oh, I tell thee, wife!——”

Tearing the rags from his arm, he endeavoured to rise. The woman, repeating loving words to him, pushed him gently back. Yielding to weakness even more than to her efforts, he sank upon his bed. The children were sent from the room and on the sunny grass-plot I stayed with them awhile, entertaining them with games and fairy-tales.

A few days later I visited the family again. The sick man was feeling much worse. He could no longer sit up, even when in a fit of rage.

“He is so exhausted,” the sorrowing wife said to me.

First I was introduced by the children, and now I enjoy in Mathes’s house a certain amount of confidence. I go up there often; it is my special desire to become acquainted with the misery of the forest.

Once, while Mathes was lying in a profound, peaceful sleep and I was sitting beside the bed, the woman drew a long, hard breath, as if she were carrying a burden. Then she spoke: “I can truly say that there is no better soul in the world than Mathes. But when a man has once been so tormented and oppressed by the people and painted so black, he would indeed become a savage, if he had a single drop of blood left in his veins.”

And a little later she continued, “I ought to know; I have known him from childhood.”

“Speak then,” I replied; “in me you see a man who never mistakes the sorrow of the heart for something evil.”

“He used to be as gay as a bird in the air; it was a joy to him simply to be alive. And at that time he did n’t know that he was to inherit two large farms; nor would he have cared, for best of all he loved God’s earth, as it lies there in the bright sunshine. But you shall see, it did not always go on in that way.”

And after a long pause the woman continued: “It may have been in his twentieth year, when one day he drove into the capital of the province, with a load of corn. The team was brought back by a mounted patrol; Mathes never came home again.”

“O ho! I ’m already home!” interrupted the sick man, endeavouring to rise. “There is nothing wrong about thy story, wife, but thou canst not know it exactly; thou wast not there, Adelheid, when they caught me. I ’ll tell it myself. When I had finished my business in town, I went into the tavern to moisten my tongue a little. In the corn-market, you must know, one’s talking apparatus becomes very dry before the last sack is shouted off from the waggon. As I entered the tavern, I found three or four gentlemen sitting at a table, and they invited me to drink a glass of wine with them. They were friendly and treated me.”

The man stopped a moment to catch his breath; his wife begged him to spare himself. He did not heed her and continued: “They were telling stories about the French, who would never give us any rest, about the war times and the gay soldier’s life; and immediately afterwards they asked me how the sale of corn had succeeded and what was the price of sheep. I grew very lively, and was pleased to find that one could chat so well on all sorts of subjects with perfect strangers. Then one of them raised his glass, saying, ‘Long live our King!’ We touched glasses until they almost broke; I cried out three times as loud as the others, ‘Long live the King!’” The sick man stopped and his lips trembled. After a while he murmured: “With this cry my misfortune began. As I was about to leave, they sprang up and held me fast. ‘O ho, boy, you are ours!’ I had fallen among the recruiting officers. They led me away,—-me, a mere boy; they concealed me among the soldiers and I was sold.”

Mathes rolled up bits of moss with his bony fingers.

“Don’t grieve, wife,” he muttered, “I ‘m better now. I ’ll expose the whole crowd yet with my last words. But this I can say, upon the broad, open field I have never been so savage as I was at that time. I longed to go home; heavy, golden chains drew me thither. And once, in the middle of a stormy winter night, I ran away. In Rainhausel I stopped with an old aunt. And now my own people betrayed me. Soon the officers were there to hunt for me. In an instant I was out of the house and, slipping into the woods, I thought, ‘If they have played a trick on me, I will do the same by them.’ Two huge hunting dogs were scenting around, but I ran for quite a distance through the brook, until the hounds lost track. And the officers rummaged through everything in the hut; they thrust their knives into the straw bedding and hay, turning the whole house quite upside down. But as they did n’t find me, one of them, placing the muzzle of his gun against the breast of my old aunt, said: ‘Tell me this instant where he is, or I ’ll shoot you down like a dog!’ ‘Yes, yes, he ’s been here,’ she answered, ’but where he is now I don’t know.’ They dragged the woman out before the door, three muskets were pointed at her breast, and threateningly they whispered to her: ‘Call out quickly, as loud as you can: “Come here, Hiesel; the officers have been gone a long time!” If you don’t do it you will be buried to-morrow.’ Of course I knew nothing of all this; being concealed in the thicket, and hearing no sound, I thought I was safe. Then I heard my aunt call, ‘Come here, Hiesel; the officers have been gone a long time!’ I sprang up and, running towards the hut, I saw the woman strike her hands over her head, and I already heard laughing, and I was seized by the officers. Allmächtiger Gott! I tried to pull out my pocket dagger; but one of the men hit my arm with a club, so that to this day I cannot turn my left hand properly. They were much cleverer and stronger than I, the poor, starved devil, Mathes. And a few days later they fell upon me. Mein Gott! if each whip-lash had been a stroke of lightning which did not kill, I should have liked it a thousand times better than to be beaten and treated like a dog by a man. The two hundred lashes knocked the very devil into me. Since then, whenever my blood was up, I have repaid them ten-fold, even to my comrades in the woods. But it was meant for the others, meant for the rascals who gave me the whipping. In those days I should have liked to be the Lord God Himself just for once, by my soul!—I would have crushed the cursed earth into a thousand million pieces! My wounded back was seasoned with vinegar and salt to make it heal. Oh, there was great haste. The foreigner had descended upon the country like the fiend incarnate. Then of course I became excited and fired away like the evil one himself. When the enemy was driven back I had just one charge of powder left; for this I might have found some other victim, in our own regiment mounted on a high horse. But not that, not that! I thought to myself. Face to face, to tear him down from his white steed with my hands,—that might do,—but from ambush, no, never! But I did something cleverer yet, I ran away from the battle-field and gave my cloak to a peasant for taking me in his hay waggon across country. My home I reached in safety.”

“And if you loved your home so much, why did you not wish to fight for it?” I interrupted him. “Why did you run away?”

“It may be that it was rascality,” said Mathes, “it may be. Or perhaps—maybe it was n’t either.”

“I know a man,” I answered, “who not only did not fight for his country, but against the same.”

“I did not stay at home,” continued Mathes, “I left everything behind me and hid myself in this farthermost wilderness, so that they might never find me. Hunted, hunted, good Lord! And it was not until I reached here that I became a wild beast. My wife, thou knowest that.”

The voice was shrill, but the words were the faltering utterances of the dying. He then became silent and closed his eyes. It was as the last flare of a flame before extinction.

“The people took him for a poor abandoned wretch, when he came back,” continued the woman; “they threw groschen and pfennige into a hat and tried to present him with hat and all. For that Mathes would have killed a few of them; he wanted no alms. As the people were following him by the dozen, he climbed up a large tree, and swung himself like a wild-cat from one branch to another, until his pursuers finally saw that they were mistaken. But in mockery they called him Hieselein. Later on—yes, of course—he hunted up a wife for himself—”

“The most beautiful one in the forest!” the sick man interrupted her again, “and there was such an insolent devil in him, that he—the half-cripple—plighted his troth to this same maiden only on condition that he should not find one still more beautiful. By the holy cross, what a struggle there was over it! Others wanted the girl, too. But I led my Adelheid right under the noses of the most aristocratic and the finest of them to my home, and I would not wish to have a better girl than she is.”

Again he became silent and dropped into a half-slumber.

“He received terrible blows sometimes,” said the woman, “but because he never lost his footing or was thrown upon the ground, they called him Stehmandel. We have both of us got on right well together,” she continued in a low tone, “but he never would give up his savage ways. Every Saturday evening he used to sharpen his knife for cutting wood; but I often begged him: ‘Um Gotteswillen, let the sharpening of the knife be!’ On Sundays he would go to Kranabethannes’s and late at night he would come home with a bleeding head. I always knew that some day they would bring him home on a litter. But, when he was calm and sober, there was n’t a better, more industrious, or more helpful man in the whole forest than Mathes. Then he could be gay and laugh and weep like a child. Of course, as he was a deserter, he forfeited his farm outside in the country; but he supported the children with his own hands, and some other people as well, who could no longer earn anything. He visited the sick and comforted them, just as a priest would do. On account of his honesty and reliability, he was made master wood-cutter. However, the innkeeper was always in despair on Sundays, when Hieselein arrived, whom they had already begun to call Black Hieselein. No matter how good-naturedly he may have stumbled in at the door, they swore that he would not go away without a terrible fight. He would n’t give it up. He tried to drown his sorrow in brandy; but the brandy brought the two hundred whip-lashes to life again. He would start quarrels until the blood ran. They would throw him down, screaming, ‘So, Hieselein, now perhaps you won’t begin any more disturbance!’ He would soon be on his feet. But it is a fact that when he became sober, he would beg pardon of everyone. But at last, thou holy Mother of God, the begging pardon did not work any more. All the wood-cutters came one night to Kranabethannes’s, to show the fighter that even though he was their master at work, they were for once masters in the tavern. At first, as they see that he is drinking brandy, one glass after another, they begin to tease and mock him, until he becomes wild and attacks them. They are all over him, throw him down, tearing his hair and beard. And in this same hour his guardian angel deserts him; one hand free, he seizes his knife and plunges it into the breast of Bastian, the charcoal-burner. They then beat Mathes until he is thrown upon the ground. Two root-diggers brought him home. Perhaps to-morrow I ’ll be a widow, and the poor children——”

The woman burst into sobs. Then Mathes raised himself once more: “The Lord God has done well by thee. Perhaps I might have beaten thee in a fit of anger. But I say this, I don’t want to die so. I will get up and go to court and confess that I have stabbed Bastian. From the deceitful recruiting officers who took me from my peaceful youth and delivered me over to the bloody world, where I was disgraced with whip-lashes and hunted like a dog, and condemned for murder—to the charcoal-burner Bastian, who with scorn and mockery himself enticed the knife from its sheath—all of them I will call before the tribunal; they must all be there when I am condemned to death.”

The woman shrieked; the man sank choking, back on the moss.

Just then the children came skipping and shouting in at the door. They were dragging by the ears a white rabbit which they let loose in the room, the boy pursuing it. The little besieged animal hopped upon the bed of moss and over the limbs of the sick man. It remained sitting in the corner, sniffing and looking anxiously about with its great eyes. The boy slipped up to it and seized it by its legs. The poor tormented creature whined piteously and bit the finger of its pursuer.—“Stop! stop! you rascal!” cried the enraged boy, becoming very red in the face, while tears filled his eyes, his lips were drawn, and his fingers convulsively clutched the throat of the animal and—before either his mother or sister could interfere—the rabbit was dead.

Mathes beat his face with his hands, crying out so that my very heart quaked: “Oh, horrible! Now the angry devil lives on in my children! Must I endure that also?”

A few moments later the man fell into a terrible death struggle. He died that same evening.

They buried Black Mathes in the forest, because he had stabbed Bastian. The woman wept bitterly upon the mound, and when at last she was led away from it, the Einspanig came and planted a little pine-tree upon the grave.

THE FEAST OF THE VIRGIN MARY, 1814.

And thus I have wandered about the Winkel forests. I have been in the Hinter Winkel and in the ravines of the Miesenbach, in the forests of the Kar, in Lautergräben, and in the Wolfsgrube, in the Felsenthal and on the pastures of the Alm, and yonder in the glen where lies the beautiful lake. I have introduced myself to the old and made myself known to the young. It costs trouble and there are misunderstandings. With a few exceptions, the best of these people are not so good or the worst so bad as I formerly believed.

I am even obliged to be a little deceptive; they must not know why I am here. Many take me for a deserter and for that reason are friendly toward me. To please these foresters a man must be despised and exiled from the world, must indeed be as savage and happy-go-lucky as themselves. Then I have been obliged to look about me for some work. I weave baskets out of straw, I gather and prepare tinder and carve toys for the children out of beech wood. I have already so fully gained the confidence of the people, that they have taught me how to whet the tools, and now I understand sharpening the axes and saws of the wood-cutters. This brings me in many a groschen and I accept it—I must, indeed, depend upon the work of my hands, like everyone here. My room presents a somewhat confused appearance. And here I sit and work, when the weather is bad outside or on long autumn evenings, among the willow branches, the bits of wood, and the various tools. I am seldom alone; either my housekeeper is chatting with me, or a pitch-maker, root-digger, or charcoal-burner sits by me and smokes his pipe, watching with a grin while I begin and finish the different things, and finally going to work himself. Or there are children about me, listening to the fairy-tales which I relate, or playing with the chips, until I have finished the toy in my hands. On Sundays the forester sits with me for hours together, hearing the story of my experiences and my plans for the people of the Winkel woods. We talk over everything and I occasionally write a long letter to the owner of the forest.

The wood-cutters from Lautergräben are approaching nearer and nearer the Winkel, and already through the silent forest I have heard the crashing of many a falling tree. Upon the summit of the Lauter, a pale reddish plain is spreading from day to day and in the morning sunlight shines down in a friendly way through the dark green of the forest.

In the ravines of the Winkel, stone-breakers and ditchers are working; a waggon road is to be built for the transportation of coal and wood.

I like to go about with the workmen, watching them and talking with them, desirous of learning something of their life.

But occasionally the people are a little mistrustful of me and approach me with prejudice. I often carry a little volume of Goethe with me, and seat myself in some attractive nook to read. Many a time I have been secretly watched while so occupied. And then the report circulates through the forest that I am a wizard and have a book containing magic signs. I have wondered if this peculiar reputation may not at first have given me some advantage in carrying out my plans. The children would surely be allowed by their parents to learn to read, if I told them that by first understanding the magic signs, one could exorcise devils, dig for treasure, and control the weather. I think that the grown people themselves and even the grey-beards would drop their tools and come to school to me. But that would be dishonourable and I should only produce the opposite result from that which I desire. The chief thing is, not that the people learn to read and write, but that they may be freed from harmful prejudices and have pure hearts. Of course I might later substitute books of morals and say,—“Here are the true magic signs”; but those whom I had deceived would have no further confidence in me, and the evil would be greater rather than less.

We will not sneak through a roundabout way; we will hew a straight path through the midst of the old trees.

A few times I have read songs to the people; to the girls Heideröslein, and have taught Christel to the boys. They learn the verses quickly, and they are already much sung in the forest.

UNREST

And now the autumn has come. The clouds are dispersed with the morning mists, leaving the sky bright and clear. The brilliant foliage of the maples stands out in relief against the dark brown of the pine-forest, while in the valley, the meadow has become green anew or glistens with the silvery hoar-frost. In these woods the autumn is more brilliant and almost lovelier than the spring. In the spring there is a capricious brightness and splendour, song and exultation everywhere. The autumn, on the contrary, is like a quiet, solemn Sabbath. No longer mindful of the earth, Nature is then expectantly listening to heaven, and the breath of the Almighty stirs harmonious melodies upon the golden strings of mellow sunshine.

The sky has become so trustworthy, that it more than fulfils through the day that which it promises in the morning with its sad and misty eyes. One gazes into its still, blue depths.

Yonder beside the forest fire sits the shepherd-boy. He is taking some little round things from a bag and shoving them into the fire.

“Tell me, boy, where did you get the potatoes?”

Turning red, he replies, “The potatoes, I—I found them.”

“May God bless them to you, and another time do not find them, but go to the Winkel-warden’s wife when you are hungry; she will give you some.”

“Those which are given don’t taste good,” is the answer; “those that are found are better, the salt is already on them.”

Yonder stands a bush, which has decorated itself in the night with a chain of dew pearls; to-day the dew is congealed and is destroying the very heart of the plant.

On such a late autumn day I saw at one time an old woman sitting in the woods. This woman once had a child. He went out to the world, to hot Brazil, seeking for gold. The horizon is so perfectly clear, that the mother is able to gaze into the distant past, where the beloved boy is standing. She looks at him, smiles at him, and falls asleep. The next morning she is still sitting upon the stone, and now she has a white mantle about her. The snow has come, the autumn is over. And across the sea a ship is bearing a letter bound for the hot zones of South America. It carries news to a sun-burnt man from his distant home,—“Mother died in the woods.” A tiny tear laboriously winds its way from under his lashes, the sun quickly dries it, and afterwards as before the watchword is: Gold! Gold! If a single letter might come back to the old motherland, its message would be,—“The son crushed with gold.”

What am I dreaming here? It is the way of the world, and is no concern of mine. I long for peace in the midst of the quiet autumn of this forest.

Up there in the top of the beech-tree, a weary leaf loosens itself, falls from branch to branch and dangles by an infinitesimally tender, shining spider’s web, down to me upon the cool, shadowy earth. The people far away with whom I used to live, what may they be doing? That wonderful maiden is always blooming—always—even in the autumn; and in Saxonland the dry leaves are wafted over the graves.

Loneliness cannot banish the sorrow of loneliness. I must look for something to distract and elevate me that I may not become one-sided in my surroundings.

I have commenced the study of botany; I have read from books how the erica grows, and the heath-rose, and other flowers; and I have watched the same plants hours and hours at a time. And I have found no connection between the dead leaf in the book and the living one in the woods. The book says of the gentian: “This plant belongs to the fifth class, among those of the first order, is found in the Alps, has a bluish juice, and serves as medicine.” It speaks of a number of anthers, pistils, embryos, etc. And that is the family and baptismal certificate of the poor gentian. Oh, if such a plant could read, it would freeze on the spot! That is indeed more chilling than the hoar-frost of autumn.

The forest people know better. The flower lives and loves and speaks a wonderful language. But the gentian trembles with foreboding, when man approaches; and it is more afraid of his passionately glowing breath than of the deathly cold kiss of the first snow.

So I am one who does not understand and is not understood. Without aim or plan I am whirling in the monstrous, living wheel of nature.

Ah, if I but only understood myself! Scarcely at rest, after the fever of the world and enjoying the peace of the woods, I already long again to cast one glance into the distance, as far as the eye of man can reach.

Yonder upon the blue forest’s edge, I would I might stand and look far out into the land over at other men. They are no better than the foresters, and know scarcely more; yet they are striving after, hoping for, and seeking Thee, O God!

ON JACOB’S LADDER

One beautiful autumn morning I felt inclined to climb the high mountain, whose loftiest peak is called the Graue Zahn. With us down here in the Winkel, there is altogether too much shade, and up there one stands in the bright circle of the wide world. There is no path thither; one must go straight on, through underbrush, thickets, stones, and tangled mosses.

After some hours I arrived at the Miesenbach hut. The gay young pair have already departed. The living summer-time is over; the hut stands in autumn abandonment. The windows from which Aga used to peep at the lad are fastened with bars; the spring in front is neglected and has become nearly dry; and the icicle on the end of the gutter grows downwards—toward the earth. The bell of a colchicum swings near it, and rings to the last gasp of the dying fountain.

I seated myself upon the top of a watering-trough and ate my breakfast. It consisted of a piece of bread made of rye- and oat-flour, such as is eaten everywhere in this forest-land. That is a meal which, literally, tickles the palate, very coarse-grained and full of bits of bran. In the country outside, where wheat grows, such food would not be to our taste; here it is all we ask for when we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread!” But there are also times in this region when the Lord is sparing even with the oat-bread; then dried straw and moss come under the grindstone. God bless to me the piece of bread and the swallow of water with it! Prepared with God’s blessing, ye master cooks, everything becomes palatable.

I then begin to climb farther. First I cross the Kar, from whose bed project stones washed smooth by the waves. Between the stones stand tufts of pale feather-grass and lichens. Some tender, snow-white flowers are also swaying to and fro, looking anxiously about, as if they had lost their way up here on the rocky waste and longed to return whence they came. From the once so beautiful red sea of Alpine roses, the sharp bristles of the bush alone remain. I climb higher, wending my way around the walls of rock and the peak of the Kleinzahn; I then stride along a ridge which extends toward the main mountain range.

There I have before me the blinding fields of the glaciers, smooth, softly gleaming like ivory, lying there in broad, gentle slopes and hollows, or in creviced multiform precipices of ice reaching from height to height. Between, tower battlements of rock, and yonder, in the airy distance, above the gleaming glaciers, rises many a dark-grey, sharp-toothed cone, soaring far above the highest peak of the mountains. That is my goal, the Graue Zahn.

Towards the east the ground descends to the waving depths of the dusky forest. And the undulating meadows of the Alm lie deep as in a gulf. Here and there is the grey dot of an Alm hut, of which the shining roof alone is visible. On the northern side yawns the awful abyss, beneath whose shadow is the dim, black lake.

I walked a few hours over the difficult and dangerous path, along the edge to the glaciers. Here I bound on my climbing-irons, strapped on my knapsack tighter, and held my stick more firmly in my hand. The alpenstock is an inheritance from Black Mathes. It is covered with innumerable little notches, which do not show, however, how often its former possessor may have climbed the Zahn or any other mountain, but how many people he has knocked to the ground in a fight. A dismal companion! yet this has helped me up over the smooth, white snow-slopes, on over the wild ice crevasses, and finally up the last steep precipice to the summit of the Zahn. It has done it faithfully. And how gladly from this high mountain would I have called out to Mathes in eternity, “Friend, this is a good stick; had you climbed high with it, you would have understood it!”

Now I stand on the summit.

Would that I were a being that might spin itself by the threads of sunlight up to the Kingdom of God.

Under a jutting stone I seat myself upon the weather-beaten ground and look about me. Near by are the fine, broken spires of immovable, perpendicular slabs of slate. Above me a sharp breeze may be gently stirring; I do not hear it; I do not feel it; the jutting rock, the highest peak of the Zahn, protects me. The friendly warmth of the sun touches my limbs. The quiet and the nearness to heaven bring peace to my soul. I wonder how it would be in the everlasting rest. To be happy in heaven, to live always in joy, always contented and without pain; to wish for nothing, to long for nothing, to hope for nothing, and to fear nothing, on through all time. Would it not after all be a little wearisome? Should I not perhaps wish to take a leave of absence sometimes, to look down here at the world once more? My possessions here would easily go into a nutshell. But I think were I once up there I should long to be down here again. How strange are earthly joy and sorrow!

But if I came back, a good angel would have to lend me his wings that I might fly across the white mountains and sunny peaks and ridges, on into the distance yonder, where the edge of the mountain chain cuts through the airy heaven; and upon that last white peak I would rest and look over into the expanse of plain and to the towers of the city. Perhaps I might see the gable of the house, or even the gleam of the window where she is standing.

And if I saw the gleam of that window, then would I willingly turn about and enter heaven again.

Is it then really true that one can behold the sea from this peak? My eyes are not clear, and yonder, in the south, the grey of the earth blends with the grey of the sky. I already know the firm ground, the mould which they call the fruitful earth. Couldst thou, mine eye, only once reach the wide sea!

When the sun changed, so that a deep shadow appeared upon my stony resting-place, I arose and climbed to the very highest point. I took in the whole picture of the mighty, battlemented kingdom of the Alps.

And then I descended by the precipices, the crevasses of the glaciers and the snow-fields; I crossed the long ridge, finally reaching the soft, yielding meadows, where the wooded hills were before me once more. Twilight was settling over the valleys, which was most comforting to my overstrained eyes. For a while I covered them with my hand, and when at last I was able to look once more, the gold of the setting sun was illuminating the heights.

As I come to the Miesenbach hut before which I sat in the morning, a curious incident occurs.

While passing the hut, I think how friendly and homelike an inhabited human dwelling looks to the wanderer, but how forbidding and dreary the same place appears, when it stands, like an upright coffin, empty and deserted! Suddenly I hear groaning from within.

My feet, already very tired, at once become as light as a feather, and would run away, but my reason forbids, and, straining my ears to listen, I stand and gaze. From under one corner of the jutting roof proceed a pounding and snorting, and I then behold a strange spectacle. From out the rough, brown wooden wall, project a man’s head and breast, two shoulders and one hand, a living, wriggling mass, and from within I hear the noise of the knees and feet.

Ah! I think, a thief, who has filled his pockets too full and is unfortunately caught fast on coming out. It is a young head, with curly hair, waxed moustache, white shirt collar and red silk neckerchief, such as one seldom meets with in these forests.

Perceiving me, he cries loudly: “Holy cross, how lucky that someone has come at last! Could n’t you help me a little?—it needs only a jerk. Curse this window.”

“Yes, my friend,” I say; “but first, I must ask you a few questions. The man who could get you out the easiest would be the hangman, who would gently put a rope about your neck, pull a little, and all at once you would be in the free air.”

“Stupid!” he replies; “just as if an honest Christian could n’t get caught if the hole is too small. I am the son of the master wood-cutter from Lautergräben and on my way across the Alm, down to the Winkelegg forest. As I pass the hut, I see that the door stands wide open. ‘There is nothing in there,’ I said,—‘nothing at all that would be worth while to carry away, but ’t is a bad thing to leave an open door in an empty house; the snow will fly in all winter long. The herdswoman must have been in a hurry when she moved back to the valley—she must be a nice sort of a person to go and leave everything open.’ Well, I enter, close the door and from within place a few blocks of wood against it, afterwards climb upon the bench, and as I try to get out by this smoke-window, here I stick like the devil.”

But I do not yet trust the lad, and look at him awhile as he dangles.

“And you think you don’t want to remain fastened there under the roof until someone comes to-morrow and recognises you.” At this he grinds his teeth and struggles violently to escape from his ugly situation.

“I must be in Holdenschlag early to-morrow,” he mutters.

“What do you want in Holdenschlag?” I say.

“Mein Gott, because there is to be a wedding!” he growls, already quite indignant.

“And why must you be present?”

At first he refuses to answer, but finally bursts out,—“By Jessas and Anna, because I ’m needed there!”

“Oh, then of course, we must try to help you,” I say, and climbing a little way up the wall I begin pulling at the lad, until at last we have the second hand out; then it is easier. He is soon standing on the ground, where he hunts up his pointed hat which has rolled away, stretches his stiffened limbs, and with flushed face looks up once more at the little smoke-window, exclaiming, “The devil take you, that was a trap, sure enough!”

In the twilight we went down together towards the Winkelegg forest. The lad showed no disposition to talk with me. I tried to make amends for my apparent unfriendliness, assuring him that I recognised at once that he was no thief. “And to-morrow then, you will be in Holdenschlag at the wedding? Are you the groomsman?” I asked.

“The groomsman, no, I am not that.”

“Perhaps then the ceremony could have been performed without you.”

He pulled his hat over his eyes, which were fixed on the ground.

“Without me,” he said at last; “no, I don’t think it could. For you see, this is the way of it, it could n’t be done without me, because—because, it looks very much as if I were the bridegroom.”

On hearing these words, I stopped and stared a moment at the lad, thinking how dreadful it would have been if the bride and the whole wedding should have waited and waited below, while the bridegroom was struggling up there in the smoke-window of the herdsman’s hut. The young man then politely invited me to his wedding. He guided me faithfully as we walked down through the dark forest to the narrow valley of the Winkelegg.

Here we passed a huge pile of bare logs, which had been sent down through a long shoot from the Winkelegg forest. Near the pile of wood were three large charcoal-kilns, from which, slowly and silently, the milk-white smoke rose to the tops of the trees and into the dark autumn sky.

The wood-cutter’s son from Lautergräben urged me to accompany him into the hut which stands under the spreading pine.

In the cabin are three people, two hens, one cat, and the fire on the hearth. No other living creature is visible.

A young woman is standing by the hearth, laying larch-branches crosswise on the fire. My companion informs me that she is his betrothed.

Behind the broad tile stove, which reaches to the sooty ceiling, sits a little woman. She glares at me, the strange intruder, with her large green eyes, while with unsteady fingers she is drawing the strings through a new pair of shoes. At the same time she continually wipes her eyes, which are already dimmed like an old window-pane that for many years has been exposed to the smoke of the charcoal-burner’s hut. My companion tells me that this is the mother of his betrothed, who is everywhere called by the people, Russkathel.

Beyond, in the darkest corner, I see a rough, manly figure, his body bared to the waist, washing and scrubbing himself over a massive wooden basin with such force that he snorts like a beast of burden.

“That is the brother of my betrothed,” explains the young man; “he is the charcoal-burner here and they call him Russ-Bartelmei.”

Then the wood-cutter’s son approaches his sweetheart to tell her that he has come at last, and has brought with him the highly learned man who wanders over the whole forest, and who will give them the honour of his presence on their wedding-day.

The young woman, turning toward me, says, “Find a seat somewhere if you can; everything is so dilapidated with us, we have n’t even a decent chair.”

Then the young man speaks to her in a low voice, apparently telling her the story of the herdsman’s hut, for all at once she cries out: “Oh, what a stupid fellow! Thou must needs pry into everything, or has it come to be a habit of thine, up there with the herdswoman?”

The lad turns to his mother-in-law: “Give me the shoe,—thou art leaving out half of the eyelets; such work is much too fine for thy weak eyes, Mütterchen!”

“Yes, Paul, that’s true,” mumbles the old woman good-naturedly from her toothless mouth, “but, listen, Paul; my grandmother laced my mother’s shoes, and my mother did it for me; and I, why should such an old, crooked creature as I be in the world, if I could n’t lace my Annamirl’s shoes?”

“Perhaps you ’ll soon have other work, Mütterchen; by the cradle you ’ll not need to see,” answers Paul mischievously.

At this, Annamirl shakes her finger at him, saying, “Thou good-for-nothing!”

In the dark corner the splashing and snorting continue. It is not so easy a matter for a man who has once become so blackened as Russ-Bartelmei to wash himself white enough to appear before the world, even though his sister should marry the master wood-cutter’s son from Lautergräben.

And my wood-cutter’s son draws the lacing through the shoes of his betrothed. The old woman, having once found her tongue, begins to prattle: “And don’t forget, Annamirl,” says she, “thou must try it also. It will succeed yet.”

“Dost thou mean that I should plant the christening-money, Mütterchen?”

“Yes, that ’s it. Under a branching pine-tree thou must bury a groschen on thy wedding-night. That is the money-seed, and thou shalt see, in three days it will bloom, and in three months it may indeed be ripe. Our ancestors did it, but they were not all successful. It was this way: my grandmother missed the time, my mother never found the spreading pine-tree again, and I planted a false groschen. On that account, my daughter, take careful note of the hour as well as of the tree, then the groschen will grow, and thou shalt have money enough all thy days.”

Annamirl opens an old chest and begins to rummage among the clothes and other contents. I believe she was seeking the christening-money.

The charcoal-burner washes and rubs himself. He changes the water many times, but it is always as black as ink. But finally it remains only grey; then Russ-Bartelmei stops and dries himself; he dresses, sits down on the door-sill, and, taking a long breath, says, “Yes, folks, I ’ve got rid of one skin now, and the other is beginning to show a little.” The new one, however, has grown very red, although in places it is still somewhat dingy; but it is Russ-Bartelmei all the same, who is going to his sister’s wedding on the morrow.

I am invited to spend the night in the hut, and the bride hospitably sets a dish of eggs before me, because I am the “learned man,” who might sometime be of use, should the occasion offer itself and the children prove to be intelligent.

The smoke has driven the hens from their evening rest; so now they come to me upon the little table, and stretch their long necks over the edge of the dish into my food. Do they wish to have their eggs back again?

The old woman, too, is all the time coming closer to me; twice she opens her mouth as if to speak, then closes it again, murmuring into her blue neckerchief: “I won’t say it after all; ’twill be more sensible.” Seeing her timidity, I come to her aid: “Well, what is it, Mütterchen?”

“God bless you for the question,” she replies, drawing still nearer to me. “People like us can’t see into the future. To speak out plainly,—you are a learned man, they say, so you will surely understand fortune-telling?—No, not at all?—But I should think a man like you ought to learn that. And now that we have become so well acquainted, do you know no numbers for the lottery?”

“Jesstl and Joseph,” suddenly screams the young woman, “hurry, hurry, Mütterchen! I think the kitten has tumbled into the water-pail!”

The old woman stumbles toward the corner, from which Bartelmei has just come; but the kitten has already disappeared, was perhaps never in the water. Annamirl, ashamed of her mother’s childish questions, has stopped them by this trick.

The next day, when the morning red is glowing through the white smoke, the people come from all parts of the forest. They are dressed and decked out as I have never seen them before. They bring wedding-presents with them. The pitch-maker comes with a black, glistening jug of pitch-oil. “For the health of the bridal couple,” he announces, and then adds: “What is the message of the pitch-oil? If in life you have trouble to bear, you must apply at once the oil of patience. That says the pitch-oil.” Root-diggers come with seeds and bunches of fragrant herbs, and the ant-grubbers, with incense; children bring wild fruit in little baskets of fir-bark; wood-cutters come bearing household utensils. Schwamelfuchs, an old hunchbacked, rough little man, is dragging a huge earthenware bowl, a veritable family kettle, large enough to feed a dozen mouths. Others bring wooden spoons for it; again others unpack meal- and lard-buckets, and a charcoal-burner’s wife comes staggering in quite embarrassed and hands the bride a carefully wrapped package. As with awkward words of thanks she opens it, two fat stuffed capons come to light. These are spied by Russkathel, who, already in gala dress, and full of eager expectation, is creeping along the walls, and she whispers to her daughter: “Dost thou know, Annamirl, where the best wedding-gift should be put? Ah, yes, it should be buried in the cool earth. Later a beautiful woman will come in a golden waggon, drawn by two little kittens; these will dig out the wedding-gift with their claws, and the woman, taking it in her snow-white hand, will drive three times around the hut; afterwards no sorrow can come to your holy wedlock.” So the tale of Freya is still told in the German forest.

Annamirl is silent for a moment, and, turning the heavy, neatly picked and stuffed fowls around and around in her hands, as if they were already on the spit, she finally remarks: “I think, mother, they would spoil in the earth, or the cats would eat them, and for that reason, I say, let us eat them ourselves.”

At last even the elegant brandy-distiller arrives with his huge earthen jug, which immediately spreads an odour of spirits throughout the house. Scenting it, Russ-Bartelmei, curious to see how such a jug is made and corked up, hurries forward at once.

But here Annamirl interferes: “May God bless you a thousand times, Brandyhannes; that is altogether too much, we could never repay you for it. Perhaps this is the most valuable wedding-gift, so with it I will carry out the old custom.”

Quickly drawing the stopper, she pours the sparkling, smoking brandy upon the ground, to the last drop. The old woman giggles and grumbles, “Thou fool, thou! now both thy kittens will be drunk; and then what a row we shall have!”

By the time all are assembled, the sun is already shining in at the door. During the night a meal has been cooked, which the people now devour with good appetites and gay conversation. I also take part in it, afterwards joining the children who are present, giving them some of the food in their wooden dishes, that they too may have their share of the feast.

Then we all depart. With the charcoal-burners a single old man remains behind. He stands a long time before the door, resting upon his iron hook and smoking a short-stemmed pipe, while with a grin he gazes after us, until we have disappeared in the shady defile. Then only the silent, friendly morning sun still rests upon the pine-trees.

A number of men in the wedding-procession have even brought rifles with them; but to-day they do not shoot at the creatures of the forest, they fire into the air, considering that they are thus adding greatly to the festive occasion.

There is singing and shouting, until the summer day fairly trembles. Many a gay song is sung, tricks are played, old-fashioned games are tried on the way, and it is already noon when we reach the church at Holdenschlag. Five men come to meet us with trumpets, fifes, and a huge drum which the drummer beats with true festive fury; and what an excitement and roar of laughter there is, when suddenly the drum-stick breaks through the much martyred skin and, shooting into the inside, catches its tact upon the other end. A young man is stealing around the procession, and according to the old custom trying to take the bride away from us; but the groomsman is on guard, although in reality watching more closely over his purse than over the bride; for should he lose the former, the robber would drag him to some distant tavern, where he would have to pay for the drinks.

The bridegroom accompanies the first bridesmaid; not until after the ceremony does he approach his wife, and then the groomsman walks with the bridesmaid, so that the seed is sown again for a new wedding. The groomsman is well known to me; his name is Berthold; the bridesmaid is called Aga.

In the church wine is drunk and the priest gives a very edifying talk upon the sacrament of marriage and its divine purpose. The good old man speaks most beautifully, but the people from the woods do not fully understand his high German. Not until we are in the tavern, and have all eaten, drunken, and played tricks, is the real sermon for the people delivered. Then the old, bearded Rüpel raises his wine-glass and begins to speak:

“I am not learned, I wear no doctor’s cap, or monkish cowl, and if my glass were not at hand, alas! no clever word from me, my friends, would here be heard. As once did Moses, so do I, you see, with cheering wine my tongue now free. As aged Bible-reader am I known, but if a knight I were, I own, upon a snowy steed I ‘d ride across the land. Once close at hand a proverb I did spy: the Lord, the Crucified, did cry,—’Is man alone, then is he naught, but are there many,’ then he taught their worthlessness; ’so will I try and shut a pair within a hut,—alas! too little; now a house, and later even heaven ’s too small to cover and protect them all, but through the world to forests strange they go, to suffer, wandering to and fro,—to part again.’ But for His sheep the Son of God will care, though they go straying everywhere. I hear the hammer-stroke upon the cross, at foot, at left, at right; my heart is breaking at the sight. The red blood flows, which wins your heaven and mine. To Thee, O Lamb, I offer wine, for Thou didst suffer—die!”

There is silence throughout the large room, and the old man drains his glass.

But soon he fills it again and continues:

“To Him be praise! As at the feast in Galilee, so with us may our Master be, to change the water into wine, the whole of Winkel brook to-day, the whole of Winkel brook for aye! The wine is clear and pure, the white and red together flow, as sure as youthful hearts that onward go, in honour bound and love. From light of sun and moon, the wine has caught its fire, between the earth and sky—as grow our souls and bodies from on high, and from below. To bridegroom and to bride to-day, may this sweet wine bring health, I pray.”

What a merry-making and shouting now follows, and the fifes and fiddles resound as the wine is poured upon the green wreath of the bride.

Each one now raises his glass and extemporaneously delivers his wedding-speech or bridal-poem. Finally old Russ-Kath staggers to her feet and with an incredibly clear voice sings:

  “Cut down the pear-tree,
  Cut down the box-tree,
Cut both the pear- and box-tree down,
  Sweetheart, to make thee
  Out of the box-tree
Bedstead, the finest in all the town.”

As things are now going, it seems to me that the noise and clamour must burst through all four walls, out into the quiet evening.

Gradually, however, it grows quieter and the people turn their eyes towards me, to see if I, the learned man, have no toast for the bride.

So I then arise and say: “Joy and blessing to the bridal pair! And when, after five-and-twenty years, their descendants enter the marriage state, may it be in the parish church by the Winkel bridge! I drink to your health!” This is my bridal toast.

Thereupon follow a murmuring and whispering, and one of the oldest of the company approaches and politely asks me the meaning of my speech.

All night the inn at Holdenschlag resounds with the music, dancing, and singing of the wedding-guests.

The next morning we escort the bridal couple from their room. Then for a long time there is a search for the groomsman, who is nowhere to be found. We wish him to join us in the old-fashioned wedding-game, “Carrying the wood for the Cradle.”

Who would have thought that the excited boy was at this moment standing in a room in the priest’s house, wearing on his cheek a veritable Alpine glow, while with both hands he was crushing the brim of his hat!

The priest at Holdenschlag—he must be a shrewd man—walks with dignified steps up and down the room and with a fatherly voice repeats the words: “Control thyself, my son, and pray; lengthen thy evening prayer three times or seven times, if need be. The temptation will leave you at last. Marry! A penniless fellow! What for then? Hast thou house and land, hast thou servants, children, that thou needest a wife? Now, then! To marry with a beggar’s staff, such a folly is not to be thought of. How old art thou?”

At this question the lad blushes more deeply than ever. It is so unpardonably stupid not to know one’s age. And he does not know it, but he would be right within ten years if he should straightway say twenty.

“Wait until thou art thirty; earn house and land for thyself, and then come again!” is the priest’s decision. He now goes into the next room, but Berthold remains standing where he is, feeling as though he must say something more,—some weighty word which would overthrow all objections, so that the priest would answer; “Ah, that is quite another thing; then marry, in God’s name!” But the lad knows no such word, to explain and make clear why he wishes to be united, forever united, with Aga, the Alm maiden.

As the priest does not return from the neighbouring room, where he is taking his breakfast, the lad finally turns sadly towards the door and descends the steps, the Jacob’s Ladder of his love’s happiness, which a short time before he climbed with joyous confidence.

But having reached the green earth, he is another being. And the wild, overbearing way in which the boy conducts himself on this second wedding-day, makes one suspicious.

In the afternoon, man and wife, boy and maiden, depart in couples; Andreas Erdmann joins the old, bearded Rüpel and we all return to the forests of the Winkel.