Legend of the Devil's Mill.
The summit of the Ramberg, or Victor's Höhe, is strewed with gigantic ruins of the primeval rocks, and is called the Brocken of the Unterharz.
Two huge granite boulders, lying as if they had been placed there by hands, are the remains of the Teufelsmühle.
At the base of the mountain, in the ages long ago, a miller possessed a windmill.
But the mill, an inheritance from his great-great-grandfather, was in a tumble-down condition, and when the wind blew from the north or west the sweeps stood motionless, for mountain and forest intercepted the "breath of God."
Often the miller had sat on the summit of the mountain, and thought how nice it would be if the mill only stood there in the free, full breeze, with a strong tower, built from the materials that lay scattered around in superfluous abundance.
Once, as he thus sat and mused in the twilight, the bats and owls just beginning their nocturnal rounds, a huge, swarthy labourer suddenly appeared before him, greeted him with a Gott-sei-bei-uns! and told him he would build him a mill, so soon as the miller signed a promise with blood to be his in thirty years.
Want, avarice, and vanity won the day with their unholy counsel, and the bond was signed.
Suddenly scores of little black figures issued forth from the darkness of the night, and began to work among the rocks; trees were cut down with a stroke, chisel and hammer rang on the granite, and the work went forward with a rapidity of enchantment.
The fear of the miller rose to despair, and as he saw the roof and the huge sweeps set up and finished, and the last millstone rolled to its place, he seized it with the power of a deadly terror, threw it from the rollers with such force, that it rolled down the mountain.
Then the black wings of the arch-fiend unfolded and spread themselves, he soared high in the air, let fall the millstone on the miller, who was buried beneath it and the ruins of the mill, broken to atoms.