"On 'wood-days' the poor are allowed to appropriate the dry boughs of the green trees. I have read somewhere that kind Nature herself instituted this traditional charity, and throws to the poor the crumbs of her laden board. The poor and the dry sticks.
"The weeds in the corn-fields are also no man's property until the poor take them away and convert them into nutritious food. Do you ask, of what use are weeds? Perhaps many other things should be judged by the same rule."
These leaves were the product of three months of comparative solitude. His habit of writing when abroad had been discovered, and had subjected him to various uncharitable suspicions. As the reader may have divined, many of them were but the answers given by the peasants to questions on matters very familiar to them, and indeed to everybody except the very learned men of learned Germany. The villagers were at their wits' end. They could not conceive how any one could be ignorant of these matters.
Those who travel afoot must have noticed the demeanor of peasants when asked the way to a place in the immediate neighborhood. At first they suspect that a joke is being played upon them; and then they give an explanation which presupposes a perfect acquaintance with other localities in point of fact equally unknown to the questioner. Yet educated men are often no wiser. Perfectly at home in a certain sphere of ideas, they take for granted that every one else is equally so, and explain themselves in such a manner as to leave the hearer more mystified than he was before.
Of course the teacher was no better known to the villagers than they to him. Very few of them had ever heard his name. One thing, however, they had discovered,--that the teacher came from Lauterbach; and this single fact was used by the wit and humor of the village as the rod with which to punish his pride and reserve. In the evening, whenever he was known to be in, the young fellows assembled under his window and sang the "Lauterbacher" without cessation. As he had taken the part of the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, they generally wound up with,--
"I won't sing any more:
A mouse ran over the floor;
I'll hunt it and I'll find it,
Put out its eyes and blind it,