air and the
sunshine that I was so thankful for. I saw my seeds sprout, but what
became of them afterwards I did not live to see. Two years after I sowed
them a famine fell upon us. The poor weavers who lived in the mountain
village had all they could do to nourish wife and child. There was little
left for the Poor-house. As I was already ill I could not stand the
misery, and I was the first to die of the dreadful fever caused by
hunger. Only one of the blind women, and the dull-witted one followed the
sack in which I was buried--for who would have paid for a coffin? The
last two nuts I divided with the old women. Each one of us had a half,
and how gladly we ate the little morsel, for even a taste of any dainty
seemed good to us, after we had lived on nothing but bread and potatoes.
From here I watched the other nuts grow to be trees. All four had
straight stems and thick crowns. Under one of them that stood near a
spring, which is now called the Fresh Spring, an old carpenter who came
to the Poor-house built a bench.'

"Here another angel interrupted the little narrator with the question:
'Do you mean the nut-tree in Dorbstadt?' and, receiving an answer in the
affirmative, he cried: 'I, Master, I am that old carpenter, and during my
last summers, I had no greater pleasure than to sit by the Fresh Spring
under the nut-tree, and while I smoked my pipe to think of my old wife,
whom I was soon to find again with you. In the autumn, too, many a dry
brown leaf found its way among the more expensive tobacco ones.'

"'And I,' cried a former peddler, breaking into the carpenter's story, 'I
assuredly have not forgotten the nut-tree, where I always set down my
pack when my shoulders were nearly broken, and under whose shade I used
to rest my weary limbs before entering the village.'

"'I, too! How often have I stopped under the spreading branches of that
tree on a hot summer day and found refreshment!' cried a former
post-messenger of Dorbstadt. A porter who had also lived there added his
praises.

"'But the nut-trees were cut down many years ago,' the latter added.

"'I saw it,' cried the spirit of little Hannele, and one heard from her
tone how she deplored it. 'They were felled when the Poor-house was given
up. 'But the great Son of God has now heard what he wished to know.'

"'No, no,' the Saviour answered, 'I should still like to know what became
of the wood of these trees.'

"The voices of several angels were heard