sses, and
slept calmly on. Now and then an occasional shot, a faint scream,
startled perhaps a young wife or an engaged girl; no one else paid any
attention to it. At the first gray light of dawn the procession returned
just as silently--every face bronzed, and here and there a bandaged
head, which did not matter. A few hours later the neighborhood would be
alive with talk about the misfortune of one or more foresters, who were
being carried out of the woods, beaten, blinded with snuff, and rendered
unable to attend to their business for some time.

In this community Frederick Mergel was born, in a house which attested
the pretensions of its builder by the proud addition of a chimney and
somewhat less diminutive window panes, but at the same time bespoke the
miserable circumstances of its owner by its present state of
dilapidation. What had once been a hedge around the yard and the garden
had given way to a neglected fence; the roof was damaged; other people's
cattle grazed in the pastures; other people's corn grew in the field
adjoining the yard; and the garden contained, with the exception of a
few woody rose bushes of a better time, more weeds than useful plants.
Strokes of misfortune had, it is true, brought on much of this, but
disorder and mismanagement had played their part. Frederick's father,
old Herman Mergel, was, in his bachelor days, a so-called orderly
drinker--that is, one who lay in the gutter on Sundays and holidays, but
during the week was as well behaved as any one, and so he had had no
difficulty in wooing and winning a right pretty and wealthy girl. There
was great merrymaking at the wedding. Mergel did not get so very drunk,
and the bride's parents went home in the evening satisfied; but the next
Sunday the young wife, screaming and bloody, was seen running through
the village to her family, leaving behind all her good clothes and new
household furniture. Of course that meant great scandal and vexation for
Mergel, who naturally needed consolation; by afternoon therefore there
was not an unbroken pane of glass in his house and he was seen late at
night still lying on his threshold, raising, from time to time, the neck
of a broken bottle to his mouth and pitifully lacerating his face and
hands. The young wife remained with her parents, where she soon pined
away and died. Whether it was remorse or shame that tormented Mergel, no
matter; he seemed to grow more and more in need of "spiritual"
bolstering