"You are quite right, and you ought to leave the Choral Society; it is no longer a fitting place for you: as a bachelor, Faller and the rest of them might quite well be your companions, but now that you are married, it won't do any longer, and you are too old to sing now."
"I too old? Each spring I am born afresh in the world. At this moment I feel as if I were a child once more. This is the spot where I built a little boat with my brother who died. How happy we were!"
"You always speak as if every trifle in your life were something marvellous. What is there remarkable in that?"
"You are right, I must learn to grow old; I am almost as old as the wood in fact, for I remember that when I was a child, there were very few large trees, but all young plantation. Now the wood, which is grown far, far above our heads, is ours."
"How do you mean ours? Has my father made it over to you?"
"No, it still belongs to your father—that is—on certain conditions. He never had the power entirely to cut down the wood, because it is our protection against the weather, a safeguard against the snow, or a landslip of the hill itself, falling on our house and burying it."
"Why do you talk to me about such things? What are they to me?"
"I don't understand you."
"Nor I you. In my situation you should not imagine such dreadful possibilities."
"Very well, then I will sing you something, and if anyone hears us, so much the better."