"Certainly I do; you are Gaudens."
"Yes, it is easy to find me; from here around the corner, down to the Maiengrund is my district. I was in the revolution too, but I lied my way out. Yes, Ludwig, you have wandered about a great deal in the wide world. It is best at home, after all; isn't it? Is this your son?"
"It is."
"God bless him. And what a splendid wife you have!--What a pity about Ernst; he has such a good heart and is such a sensible fellow, and yet commits such wicked and foolish tricks. All I wish for is to have a place where I might have some little extra profits from fruit and grass by the road; nothing ripens here but pine cones."
When Wolfgang shook hands with him at parting, he said, "He has a soft hand; he cannot swing the pickaxe as you did when you were building your first road."
"How lovely it is here," said Wolfgang. "Here you know every one, and every one knows you; you cannot meet a stranger."
He was right; it is so; and this makes a full life, but a hard one too.
We left the forester's house, where the forester's pretty wife, holding a child on her arm, greeted us. Our way lay along the crest of the mountain, and looked down into the valley, where the haystacks were scattered about the meadow, in the hollow, and along the hillside. Ludwig said:
"Whenever I thought of home, this view of the valley always came back to me. I was walking here once with Ernst, while he was yet quite a little fellow, and he said to me, 'Ludwig, look at the haystacks. Don't they look like a scattered herd of cows on the meadow?'"
He must have noticed that his allusion to Ernst had agitated me, and he added, "Father, we must be strong enough to think calmly of the dead and of the lost ones."