“Why trouble about that, comrade?” asked Ezekiel, laughing. “Hast thou not all thou canst need for a jolly life on earth, and is not that enough? That is just the comfort of having these cold hearts, that such thoughts cannot terrify us.”
“True; yet we think such thoughts, and though I may no longer feel any dread now, yet I remember how I felt when I was still an innocent boy.”
“Well, I don’t suppose our lot will be of the best,” said Ezekiel. “I asked a schoolmaster once, and he told me that after death all hearts were weighed, to see how heavily they were laden with sins. The lightest rise up, but the heavy ones sink down, and methinks our stones will be of tolerable weight.”
“Yes, truly,” replied Peter; “and even now it often makes me uneasy to feel my heart so careless and indifferent when I think of such matters.”
So they talked; but on the following night Peter heard the well-known voice whisper in his ear, five or six times: “Peter, get thee a warmer heart.”
Still he felt no remorse at the thought of having killed Lisbeth; but when he replied, in answer to the servants’ inquiries, that his wife was away on a journey, he thought within himself: “What may that journey be?”
He went on thus for six days, always hearing the voice by night, and by day always thinking of the wood-spirit and his terrible threat; but on the seventh morning he sprang from his bed, crying, “So be it, then; I will try whether I can get me a warmer heart, for this unfeeling stone in my breast makes life weary and desolate to me.” He hastily put on his Sunday clothes, mounted his horse, and rode to the “Pine-thicket.”
On reaching the spot where the trees begin to stand closer together, he dismounted, made fast his horse, and began, with a rapid step, to ascend the hill. When he reached the top, and stood beneath the great pine, he raised his voice and repeated:—
“O Treasure-Keeper in the forest green,