ribe herself, according to a local expression, as an
"old-experienced" woman, and yet she was exceedingly active. Every day,
year in and year out, she ate a few juniper berries, and people said
that was the reason why she was so vigorous and showed her sixty-six
years so little. The fact that the two sixes stood together caused her,
according to an old country saying[3] (which, however, was not
universally believed in) to be regarded as a witch. It was said that she
sometimes milked her black goat for hours at a time, and that this goat
gave an astonishing quantity of milk, but that in milking this goat she
was in reality drawing the milk out of the udders of the cows belonging
to persons she hated, and that she had an especial grudge against Farmer
Rodel's cattle. Moreover, Marianne's successful poultry-keeping was also
looked upon as witchcraft; for where did she get the food, and how was
it that she always had chickens and eggs to sell? It is true that in
the summer she was often seen collecting cock-chafers, grasshoppers, and
all kinds of worms, and on moonless nights she was seen gliding like a
wil-o'-the-wisp among the graves in the churchyard, where she would be
carrying a burning torch and collecting the large black worms that crept
out, all the time muttering to herself. It was even said that in the
quiet winter nights she held wonderful conversations with her goat and
with her fowls, which she housed in her room during the winter. The
entire wild army of tales of witchcraft and sorcery, banished by school
education, came back and attached itself to Black Marianne.

Amrei sometimes felt afraid in the long, silent winter nights, when she
sat spinning by Black Marianne, and nothing was heard but an occasional
sleepy clucking from the fowls, or a dreamy bleat from the goat. And it
seemed truly magical how fast Marianne spun! She even said once:

"I think my John is helping me to spin." And then again she complained
that this winter, for the first time, she had not thought wholly and
solely of her John. She took her self to task for it and called herself
a bad mother, and complained that it seemed all the time as if the
features of her John were slowly vanishing before her--as if she were
forgetting what he had done at such and such a time, how he had laughed,
sung, and wept, and how he had climbed the tree and jumped into the
ditch.

* * * * *

But however cheerfully and brightly