ild of starvation and early toil. He was dry and pallid,
thin and anaemic. She was touched by his faintheartedness; he who
nevertheless seemed to be about thirty years old. She thought that
he must live quite alone in the forest since he was so pitiful and
so meanly dressed. He could have no one to look after him, neither
mother nor sister nor sweetheart.

***

The great compassionate forest spread over the wilderness.
Concealing and protecting, it took to its heart everything which
sought its help. With its lofty trunks it kept watch by the lair of
the fox and the bear, and in the twilight of the thick bushes it
hid the egg-filled nests of little birds.

At the time when people still had slaves, many of them escaped to
the woods and found shelter behind its green walls. It became a
great prison for them which they did not dare to leave. The forest
held its prisoners in strict discipline. It forced the dull ones to
use their wits and educated those ruined by slavery to order and
honor. Only to the industrious did it give the right to live.

The two who met on the heath were descendants of such prisoners of
the forest. They sometimes went down to the inhabited, cultivated
valleys, for they no longer feared to be reduced to the slavery
from which their forefathers had fled, but they were happiest in
the dimness of the forest. The hunter's name was Toenne. His real
work was to cultivate the earth, but he also could do other things.
He collected herbs, boiled tar, dried punk, and often went hunting.
The dancer was called Jofrid. Her father was a charcoal burner. She
tied brooms, picked juniper berries and brewed ale of the
white-flowering myrtle. They were both very poor.

They had never met before in the big wood, but now they thought
that all its paths wound into a net, in which they ran forward and
back and could not possibly escape one another. They never knew how
to choose a way where they did not meet.

Toenne had once had a great sorrow. He had lived with his mother for
a long while in a miserable, wattled but, but as soon as he was
grown up he was seized with the idea to build her a warm cabin.
During all his leisure moments he went into the clearing, cut down
trees and hewed them into squared pieces. Then he hid the timber in
dark crannies under moss and branches. It was his intention that
his mother should not know anything of all this work before he was
ready to build the house. But his mother died before