shes around--"Good luck to you!"

Most of the miners dwell in Clausthal, and in the adjoining small town
of Zellerfeld. I visited several of these brave fellows, observed their
little households, heard many of their songs, which they skilfully
accompany with their favorite instrument, the cithern, and listened to
old mining legends, and to their prayers which they are accustomed to
offer daily in company ere they descend the gloomy shaft; and many a
good prayer did I offer up with them! One old climber even thought that
I ought to remain among them, and become a man of the mines; but as I
took my leave notwithstanding, he gave me a message to his brother, who
dwelt near Goslar, and many kisses for his darling niece.

Tranquil even to stagnation as the life of these people may appear, it
is, nevertheless, a real and vivid life. That ancient trembling crone
who sits behind the stove opposite the great clothes-press may have been
there for a quarter of a century, and all her thinking and feeling is,
beyond a doubt, intimately blended with every corner of the stove and
the carvings of the press. And clothes-press and stove _live_--for a
human being hath breathed into them a portion of her soul.

It was only in such deeply contemplative life as this, in such "direct
relationship" between man and the things of the outer world, that the
German fairy tale could originate, the peculiarity of which consists in
the fact that in it not only animals and plants, but also objects
apparently inanimate, speak and act. To thoughtful harmless people in
the quiet homeliness of their lowly mountain cabins or forest huts, the
inner life of these objects was gradually revealed; they acquired a
necessary and consistent character, a sweet blending of fantastic humor
and purely human sentiment, and thus we find in the fairy tale--as
something marvelous and yet at the same time quite natural--the pin and
the needle wandering forth from the tailor's home and losing their way
in the dark; the straw and the coal seeking to cross the brook and
coming to grief; the dust-pan and broom quarreling and fighting on the
stairs. Thus the mirror, when interrogated, shows the image of the
fairest lady, and even drops of blood begin to utter obscure and fearful
words of the deepest compassion. And this is the reason why our life in
childhood is so infinitely significant, for then all things are of the
same importance, nothing escapes our attention, there is eq