h winter down the chimney dashes
A mass of bell-capped toad-stools grow
On viscid heaps of moldering ashes.
High on a peg above the rest
A hank of rope-yarn limply dangles
Like rotted hair, and in the tangles
The swallow built her last year's nest.

An old dog-collar set with bells
Swings from a hook by clasp and tether,
With rude embroidery that spells
"Diana" worked upon the leather.
A flute too, when the woodsman died,
The men who dug his grave forgot here;
The dog, his only friend, they shot here
And laid her by her master's side.

But while I sit in reverie,
A field-mouse near me shrilly crying,
The squirrel barking from his tree,
And from the marsh the frogs replying--
Then eerie shudders o'er me shoot,
As if I caught from out the dingle
Diana's bells once more a-jingle
And echoes of the dead man's flute.

* * * * *

THE JEW'S BEECH-TREE (1841)

BY ANNETTE ELIZABETH VON DROSTE-HUeLSHOFF

TRANSLATED BY LILLIE WINTER, A.B.

Frederick Mergel, born in 1738, was the son of a so-called _Halbmeier_
or property holder of low station in the village of B., which, however
badly built and smoky it may be, still engrosses the eye of every
traveler by the extremely picturesque beauty of its situation in a green
woody ravine of an important and historically noteworthy mountain chain.
The little country to which it belonged was, at that time, one of those
secluded corners of the earth, without trade or manufacturing, without
highways, where a strange face still excited interest and a journey of
thirty miles made even one of the more important inhabitants the Ulysses
of his vicinage--in short, a spot, as so many more that once could be
found in Germany, with all the failings and the virtues, all the
originality and the narrowness that can flourish only under such
conditions.

Under very simple and often inadequate laws the inhabitants' ideas of
right and wrong had, in some measure, become confused, or, rather, a
second law had grown up beside the official, a law of public opinion, of
custom, and of long uncontested privilege. The property holders, who sat
as judges in the lower courts, meted out punishments or rewards in
accordance with their own notions, which were, in most cases, honest.
The common people did what seemed to them practicable and compatible
with a somewhat lax conscience, and it was only the los