The Forest Farm

Frontispiece.]

[Drawn by Milicent Norris.

THE FOREST FARM.

The Forest Farm

Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

By
Peter Rosegger

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

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

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

Contents

Rosegger: An Appreciation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M. E. K.

PETER ROSEGGER

(By kind permission of Messrs. Staackmann, Leipsic)

To face page 15 "The Forest Farm."

Peter Rosegger
A Biographical Note

By Dr. Julius Petersen

I

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

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

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

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

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

His life, indeed, is rich in wonders, and the evolution of the peasant boy a sort of fairy tale. Rosegger has described for us his youth in the form of a novel, Heidepeters Gabriel (1872), in which it all reads like an impossible romance. Later he has published the story of his life in a series of autobiographical writings, Waldheimat (The Forest Home, 1875); Als Ich jung noch war (When I was still young, 1895); Mein Weltleben (My Life in the World, 1898); in these the same course of events is given with a wonderful truth to life. As documents of a rare human evolution they may stand on a level with Rousseau's Confessions; they are more lovable, though no less honest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote:

[1] Wald-bauer, one whose farm included forest-land.

I
My Father and I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I gave a piercing cry.

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

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

In that moment the eyes of my understanding were opened.

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

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

Footnote:

[2] A place of pilgrimage in Styria.

II
How I Gave God My Sunday Jacket

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

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

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

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

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

Then mother answered:

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

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

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

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

"Mother, here's a nice place!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Now this is most certainly Our Lord."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father said:

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

And mother whispered in my ear:

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

III
Christmas Eve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I began to cry miserably.

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

The moon stood high in the dark heavens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes:

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

[4]

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

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

[5] The birchen Lizzie—Die birkene Liesel.

IV
A Last Will and Testament

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He uttered these words with a smooth, ordinary countenance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then, I wasn't Our Lord.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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