ound it. The Forest Miller's wife was an
excellent woman, and her daughter Tony takes after her. The good
creature gave me dry clothes, and took as much care of me as if I had
been her sister. But for three days I felt as if all my limbs had been
dislocated. I started for home at last.

"When any one has been lost in a wood, it is scarcely possible to
realise that they have a home of their own--a place where your bed
stands, your looking-glass, your table, your chest of drawers, your
Psalm Book. Oh! what good old friends these all seem, and how you love
them all when you come home, and would gladly thank the tables and
chairs for having stood steadily in the same place, and quietly waited
for your return. And do you know the worst part of losing your
way?--that you are so laughed at when you tell the story afterwards.
But I wish no one--not even the Roettmaennin herself--to have such a
thing happen to them.

"It was a lovely summer's day, the Sunday after All Saints--no, not
Sunday, the Monday of Peter and Paul. Oh! what must it be to wander
about in the snow at night, and such a child, too! what could it do but
lie down and die! Oh heavens! I see the child before me, fast in the
snow, or in the cleft of a rock, its hands struggling, and its feet
frozen, so that it cannot move; and crying out, 'Mother!' and
listening, and hoping that some one will come, and no one answers but
the raven on the tree. And a hare runs past him--whish!--over the snow.
It is afraid of the child, and the child looks after the hare, and
forgets his misery for the moment. 'Mother! mother!' he goes on
calling, and it is a blessing that he falls asleep at last, never to
wake again. Good heavens! what an unhappy creature I am to have such
thoughts pass through my mind; and come they will, I can't help it; but
it runs in our family, and my mother was right in saying, that she knew
more than that two and two made four. And you know what happened to the
poor child that lies buried up yonder in Wenger. He was found in the
wood on the third day, quite covered with snow, and only close to his
heart was the snow melted. All those who saw it could not help sobbing
their very hearts out; and the mother became an idiot. The Herr Pastor
wrote a beautiful epitaph on the tombstone: I knew it once by heart,
but I could not repeat it now. And what happened to the hatter, who was
carrying a bundle of newly dyed hats on New Year's Day to Knusling? He
arrived at t