RELATES WHAT KIND OF HARVEST MASTER FINK GATHERED IN THE COURSE OF HIS JOURNEY.
The duty I had set myself to perform was to speak to Gideon Wolf's mother concerning his doings. I would tell her, gently and kindly, that he needed counsel from some one to whom he would listen with respect. Who was better able to enforce this advice than the mother who had nursed him at her breast? She should learn all about Pretzel the Miser's character, and how that association with a wretch so vile could be productive of nothing but evil. I would speak to her also about Katrine Loebeg, and beg her to save that innocent young girl from shame. Moreover, I was prepared to advance her a small sum of money, with which her son could set up business in another town, at some distance from me, where there was no watch-maker, and where one could do a fair trade. I would lend the money to her, not to Gideon. If she repaid me, well if not, well. It would not ruin me. With industry, and with his mother living with him to attend to his wants and do the household work, he might in time get better thoughts in his head, and become a respectable member of society. This would I do for my old sweetheart's sake.
The direction, therefore, I took was towards the village in which I had passed my youthful days and dreamed my youthful dreams, the village of which Louisa was once the pride and the beauty, and in which she still lived, a broken-down woman, old before her time, on whom the years had pressed with a bitter hand. One friend and another came out of their shops and houses to shake hands with me and ask questions about my journey, for the knapsack on my shoulders excited their curiosity. They all had kind and neighborly words for me, and nodded and smiled when I told them I was going to take a holiday and do a little business at the same time. Never till that day did I know how much I was respected by my neighbors, and how sincere was the affection they entertained for me. These feelings were mutual. There are memorials which grow in silence and stillness, of the growth of which we are almost unconscious until some action of ours out of the ordinary groove brings them into view and then there is suddenly revealed to us a full-bearing tree of love or hate. One good woman insisted upon my stopping at her door. Running to the rear of her house and running quickly back again, she brought me a beautiful white rose, which she stuck in my coat.
"Going a-courting, I do believe," she said, with a merry smile.
"I am past that long ago," I replied.
"No, indeed," she said "if you cared to ask, you would not be single at the end of the year."
"Well, then," I said to her little girl, about six years old, who was clinging to her gown, "will you marry me, little maid?" The child hid her face in her mother's dress, and blushed as if she had been fifteen. "There now," I said, "what did I tell you?"
I stooped and kissed the little maid, and she gave me two kisses for my one.
"If that answer doesn't satisfy you," said the gay-hearted mother, "you are hard to please. Mind! I shall keep you to it!"
So we parted, blithely.