er to whom it
sometimes occurred to look up dusty old documents. It is hard to view
that period without prejudice; since it has passed away it has been
either haughtily criticised or foolishly praised; for those who lived
through it are blinded by too many precious recollections, and the newer
generation does not understand it. This much, however, one may assert,
that the shell was weaker, the kernel stronger, crime more frequent,
want of principle rarer. For he who acts according to his convictions,
be they ever so faulty, can never be entirely debased; whereas nothing
kills the soul more surely than appealing to the written law when it is
at variance with one's own sense of what is right.

The inhabitants of the little country of which we speak, being more
restless and enterprising than their neighbors, certain features of life
came out more sharply here than would have been the case elsewhere under
like conditions. Wood stealing and poaching were every-day occurrences,
and in the numerous fights which ensued each one had to seek his own
consolation if his head was bruised. Since great and productive forests
constituted the chief wealth of the country, these forests were of
course vigilantly watched over, less, however, by legal means than by
continually renewed efforts to defeat violence and trickery with like
weapons.

The village of B. was reputed to be the most arrogant, most cunning, and
most daring community in the entire principality. Perhaps its situation
in the midst of the deep and proud solitude of the forest had early
strengthened the innate obstinacy of its inhabitants. The proximity of a
river which flowed into the sea and bore covered vessels large enough to
transport shipbuilding timber conveniently and safely to foreign ports,
helped much in encouraging the natural boldness of the wood-thieves; and
the fact that the entire neighborhood swarmed with foresters served only
to aggravate matters, since in the oft-recurring skirmishes the peasants
usually had the advantage. Thirty or forty wagons would start off
together on beautiful moonlight nights with about twice as many men of
every age, from the half-grown boy to the seventy-year-old village
magistrate, who, as an experienced bell-wether, led the procession
as proudly and self-consciously as when he took his seat in the
court-room. Those who were left behind listened unconcernedly to the
grinding and pounding of the wheels dying away in the narrow pa