a lodging. The bauer, however, excused himself: it was from
no evil intention, he said, but he could not take strangers in. The
three wanderers pleaded how ill would be their condition if left in
the fields all night. Still the bauer made no other reply, until, on
their pressing him, he finally declared, half in anger, that they must
themselves be responsible for their night's rest. He wished to treat
them well, but could offer them no better bed than the top of the oven
in the stube. This offer they willingly accepted, but hardly had
they lain down when a peasant-woman entered with a pail of water and
brushes. In spite of their entreaties, she scrubbed and scrubbed away
all night, and hardly had she finished when, the work not pleasing
her, she began scrubbing the floor and woodwork over again. Thus the
cleaning lasted the livelong night, until in the early morning the
maid-servant entered and the woman disappeared; the floor and walls
being, to their astonishment, as dry and dusty as the evening before.
Whereupon they spoke to the bauer of their troublesome visitor.
'Do not accuse me,' he replied 'of inhospitality: this is a strange
matter, from which I would fain have kept you. Intolerable as it has
been to you, it is still worse for me, knowing that the woman who thus
scrubs, and with so much din, is my poor dead wife. Her brain, when
she was alive, was quite turned about cleaning. She could not even go
to church with me and the neighbors, but must stay at home and clean.
So, being a bad manager, and not washing her soul white, she seems
unfit for heaven, and must needs come here every night to continue her
work. Even masses don't seem to help her.'"

Such tales were either related by the hut-fire on airy mountain or in
the fir woods. Moidel might have told us ghost-stories in the barn at
night, but there, in the solitary darkness, they appeared to her too
horribly real, especially with sleepy auditors, who might any moment
drop into unconsciousness, leaving her in a dismal fright over her own
tale.

One afternoon, accompanied by this faithful companion, we determined
to attack the summit of the mountain, which in a mantle of fir wood
rose immediately behind the huts. We were anxious to see what lay on
the other side, but after a hard though exhilarating climb we learned
that the mountain was but a huge overhanging shoulder, the rocky head
of the giant rising up in the midst of wide sweeping moors some six
miles d