Legends from River & Mountain

by Carmen Sylva; Alma Strettell

But before they could be married a strange thing happened. As he sat waiting one day on the bank of the lake beside his empty boat, he heard a sound among the bushes behind him, and looking round, fancied he saw a gleam of red-gold hair through the leaves. At the same time, he could have sworn that a voice quite close to him murmured these words: “Is the oak-tree not yet grown?”

He sprang up and went in search, as he thought, of a would-be passenger, but no one was there; only, as he bent his head down to peer through the under-brush, a slender water-snake glided from amongst it, almost touching his face with its forked tongue—“as though it would have kissed him,” he said afterwards. He started back with a shout of disgust, for he had always had a great dislike to snakes, and snatching up a stone from the ground, threw it at the creature. But it glided away untouched; only, as it went, it gave, so Dietrich swore, such a horrible and piercing scream, that his ears rang with it, and when that dreadful sound died away, all other sounds, too, ceased for him, and he was deaf from that hour.

He went home a graver man than before, and since all attempts to cure his deafness failed, he told Alice that he would give her back her word. But the stout-hearted little woman would not hear of it; she had had many a talk with Johanna, and was persuaded that, since his adventure, Dietrich needed her more than ever. “No such small matter,” she said, “would keep her from the man she loved.”

So these two, also, were wed; though there was but a poor prospect before them, for Dietrich soon saw that his infirmity would oblige him to give up his ferryman’s calling, and that just when he most needed it, for there would before long, he knew, be another mouth to feed in the little hillside cottage.

One spring evening, when the rain was falling and the wind swept the wet branches of the oak-tree right across the roof, Dietrich said to his wife: “I have a mind to cut down that oak-tree, and sell the timber, after I have used some to make a cradle for the little one that is coming. I never could abide the tree, and it now so overshadows the house that it grows damp for want of sun.”

“I planted the tree when thy father was ill,” said old Johanna from her nook by the fire, “and thought that its growth was a good omen for us.”

“It hath brought us but scant luck, that I can see,” rejoined Alice; “perhaps it will be a better omen dead than living.”

So the oak-tree was cut down, and the timber lay for a while and became seasoned; and when Dietrich’s little son, Dietrich the third, was a thriving, sturdy babe of a few months, his father one day brought in the new cradle that he had made him from the fallen oak-tree.

But Johanna’s life seemed to have been cut down with the tree, for that winter she failed and died. And who knows but it was well for her; she was thus spared another grief, for when next spring’s melting snows had swollen the waters of lake and river, Dietrich, whose deaf ears no longer heard the warning rush of the neighbouring waterfall, ventured too near the narrow part of the river, in his haste to get his boat over to the side where his passengers awaited him, and so both boat and man were swept down over the fall; nor was poor Dietrich’s body found for many days.