ause they had noticed that she came always every
year on St. John's Day up to the main shaft, and looked down into its
depths, weeping, lamenting, and wringing her hands as she crept round
it, then going away again.

"The moment she saw the body she threw away her crutches, lifted her
arms to Heaven, and cried, in the most heartrending accents of the
deepest lamentation:

"'Oh! Elis Froebom! Oh, my sweet, sweet bridegroom!'

"And she cowered down beside the body, took the stony hands and pressed
them to her heart, chilled with age, but throbbing still with the
fondest love, like some naphtha flame under the surface ice.

"'Ah!' she said, looking round at the spectators, 'nobody, nobody among
you all, remembers poor Ulla Dahlsjoe, this poor boy's happy bride
fifty long years ago. When I went away, in my terrible sorrow and
despair, to Ornaes, old Torbern comforted me, and told me I should see
my poor Elis, who was buried in the rock upon our wedding-day, yet once
more here upon earth. And I have come every year and looked for him,
all longing and faithful love. And now this blessed meeting has been
granted me this day. Oh, Elis! Elis! my beloved husband!'

"She wound her arms about him as if she would never part from him more,
and the people all stood round in the deepest emotion.

"Fainter and fainter grew her sobs and sighs, till they ceased to be
audible.

"The miners closed round. They would have raised poor Ulla, but she had
breathed out her life upon her bridegroom's body. The spectators
noticed now that it was beginning to crumble into dust. The appearance
of petrifaction had been deceptive.

"In the church of Copparberg, where they were to have been married
fifty years before, they laid in the earth the ashes of Elis Froebom,
and with them the body of her who had been thus 'Faithful unto death.'"

"I see," said Theodore, when he had finished, and the friends sat
looking straight before them in silence, "that you don't much like this
story of mine. Perhaps, in your present mood of mind, it strikes you as
too painful."

"It does produce a terribly melancholy effect upon one," said Ottmar,
"and, to speak my candid opinion, I cannot say that I care about all
the Swedish 'Fraelse' holders, the national festivities, the spectral
miners, visions, and so forth. The simple account in Schubert's 'Night
Side of Natural Science,' of the finding of a body in the Falun Mine,
which an old woman recognized as her bet