into the open air?"

"Yes, Sir," answered the smith; "thanks to you and our old master. My
eye is gone of course; but how many of us have to work with but one!
The spark of iron that burnt it out might have been still bigger. It
was great pain, to be sure: that could not be otherwise; but with
God's help I am become quite stout again after all. Herr Balthasar
indeed has also done much toward helping me, and I owe a world of
thanks to his care, his kindness, and his charity. And so we do all,
everybody that belongs to him."

Another man with one eye chimed in with these praises, and added: "It
will fall out now and then that one or other of us gets maimed in this
way; for fire is not a thing to be jested with: but God has blest us
in giving us our old master; for even if a fellow were to become stark
blind, he would never let him starve or want."

The workmen were gone back to the anvil, and Edward then first
observed that Eleazar had come into the hut, and was talking to a
stranger. This was the travelling miner, the planner of the disgrace
inflicted upon old Conrad, which of all mortifications he could have
endured was the bitterest. Eleazar was scolding vehemently, and said
it was quite impious to drive an old man by such tricks into a
passion, nay to the brink of despair; for he had heard that Conrad was
running franticly about the mountains, utterly deaf to all advice and
consolation.

The stranger excused and defended himself as well as he could; and as
the sledges had now begun hammering again, while the roar of the
bellows mingled with that of the waters, the quarrel was lost sound
of, and only grew somewhat more audible, when Conrad himself in a fury
rusht howling with swollen face and red starting eyes up to the
disputants.

"My honour!" he screamed, "my honour as a noble miner! my glory and
my pride! all are gone, irrevocably and for ever! And by a pack of
base boors, by a puny, cream-faced, chicken-breasted, outlandish
starveling, have I been robbed of it. Amid all the mountains round,
and doubtless in many others likewise, there was not a miner nor a
mine-surveyor who could boast that he had never in his life been down
in the beggarly plain. I awoke in the straw, in the corn, such was the
rascals plot to ruin me. The ears were sticking in my nose and eyes
when I came to myself, the sorry, brittle, bristly stuff, that I had
never yet seen except in the pallet of my bed. Scandal and shame!
Murder and h