on the
trumpet-blowing angels, who were to proclaim the end of the reign
of sin. He cried out to the waves of the sea of blood, which were
to drown the unrighteous. He called on the pestilence, which should
fill the churchyards with heaps of dead.

Round about stretched a desert plain. But a little higher up on the
river bank stood an old willow with a short trunk, which swelled
out at the top in a great knob like a head, from which new,
light-green shoots grew out. Every autumn it was robbed of these
strong, young branches by the inhabitants of that fuel-less heath.
Every spring the tree put forth new, soft shoots, and in stormy
weather these waved and fluttered about it, just as hair and beard
fluttered about Hatto the hermit.

A pair of wagtails, which used to make their nest in the top of the
willow's trunk among the sprouting branches, had intended to begin
their building that very day. But among the whipping shoots the
birds found no quiet. They came flying with straws and root fibres
and dried sedges, but they had to turn back with their errand
unaccomplished. Just then they noticed old Hatto, who called upon
God to make the storm seven times more violent, so that the nests
of the little birds might be swept away and the eagle's eyrie
destroyed.

Of course no one now living can conceive how mossy and dried-up and
gnarled and black and unlike a human being such an old plain-dweller
could be. The skin was so drawn over brow and cheeks, that he
looked almost like a death's-head, and one saw only by a faint
gleam in the hollows of the eye sockets that he was alive. And the
dried-up muscles of the body gave it no roundness, and the
upstretched, naked arms consisted only of shapeless bones, covered
with shrivelled, hardened, bark-like skin. He wore an old,
close-fitting, black robe. He was tanned by the sun and black with
dirt. His hair and beard alone were light, bleached by the rain and
sun, until they had become the same green-gray color as the under
side of the willow leaves.

The birds, flying about, looking for a place to build, took Hatto
the hermit for another old willow-tree, checked in its struggle
towards the sky by axe and saw like the first one. They circled
about him many times, flew away and came again, took their
landmarks, considered his position in regard to birds of prey and
winds, found him rather unsatisfactory, but nevertheless decided in
his favor, because he stood so near to the river an