erly it was quite otherwise, and, though he himself were to look
through the window at this moment, I say, as I have said time and
again, that Dutch Michael is to blame for all the mischief. Well--one
hundred or more years ago, there lived a rich timber merchant who had a
very large business; he traded far away down the Rhine, and his affairs
prospered, for he was a good Christian. One evening there came to his
door a man, the like of whom he had never cast eyes upon. He was
dressed as one of our young Black-Foresters, but was a good head taller
than any of them; indeed, one could hardly have believed that there was
such a giant in existence. The fellow asked the merchant for work, and
the latter, seeing how strong and capable of doing heavy work he
looked, was ready to engage him at a fair wage. So the matter was
agreed upon. Michael turned out to be a workman such as that merchant
had never yet employed. He was equal to three men at felling trees, and
where it took six men to carry one end of a trunk, he could manage the
other end all by himself. But after six months at tree-felling, he went
one day to his master, and demanded of him: 'I have been hewing wood
long enough in this place, and I would like to know where the felled
trunks go; how would it be if you were to let me go for a time on one
of your rafts?'"

The timber merchant replied: "I won't stand in your way, Michael, if
you want to see a bit of the world. It's true that I am in sore need of
strong fellows like yourself for the tree-felling, while on the rafts
it is more a question of skill. For this once, however, you may go!"

And thus it was; the raft upon which he was to go was in eight parts,
the last part being composed of enormous roof-beams. But what happened?
The night before starting, this huge fellow brought down to the water
yet another eight beams, bigger and longer than any that had ever been
seen, so much so that everybody was amazed. And no one knows to this
day where he had felled them. The merchant chuckled to himself when he
calculated the price these beams would fetch. But Michael said: "These
are for me to travel upon, for I could not make any headway on those
little splinters."

His grateful master then wished to present him with a pair of
raftsmen's boots, but Michael put them aside, and brought forth another
pair, such as had never before been made. My grandfather used to
declare that they must have weighed a hundred pounds, and wer