Legends from River & Mountain

by Carmen Sylva; Alma Strettell

Coal-Munk Peter often thought of these three men, as he sat alone in the pine-woods. All three, indeed, had one and the same ugly fault, which won them every man’s hatred—and this was their inhuman avarice and hard-heartedness towards their debtors and the poor about them; yet the people of the Black Forest are kind-hearted as a rule. But so it goes in this world—if they were hated for their meanness, they were thought much of for their wealth, for who else could throw money about as though they shook it down from the fir-trees?

“I can’t go on like this,” said Peter sadly to himself one morning—the day before had been a holiday, and the ale-house full of people—“if the luck doesn’t turn soon, I shall do myself a harm! If only I were rich and respected, like fat Ezekiel, or bold and powerful, like the long Shuffler, or famous, like the king of the dancing-floor, and could throw the musicians thalers instead of pence, as he does! Where can the fellow get all his money from?”

He thought over all the means he had heard of, whereby men make money, but could not seem to hit on any good ones. At last he remembered the tales about the folk who had been enriched, in old days, by Dutch Michael and the little Glass-man. In his father’s lifetime their hut had often been visited by poor people like themselves; then the talk had always been of rich men, and of how they had come by their riches, and in these tales the little Glass-man often played a part. When he thought hard, he could almost remember the verse which had to be spoken in the “Pine-thicket” in the midst of the forest, to make him appear. It began thus:—

“O Treasure-keeper in the forest green,

Thine age is many hundred years—this land

Is all thine own, wherever pine-trees stand——”

But however he cudgelled his memory, he could not remember another line. He was often on the point of asking some old man among the neighbours how the verse ended; but a certain timidity withheld him from betraying his thoughts to any one; and besides, he came to the conclusion that the legend of the little Glass-man could not be widely known, or the verse either, for there were not many rich people in the district, and why should not his own father, or any of the other poor men, have tried their luck? At last he led his mother to speak about the little man. She began by telling him nothing but what he already knew; nor could she remember any but the first line of the charm; but she wound up by saying that the spirit only appeared to persons who were born on a Sunday between eleven and two o’clock. He himself, she added, was one of the right people, as he had been born exactly at noon on a Sunday.

When Coal-Munk Peter heard this, he was beside himself with joy and eagerness to attempt the adventure. He thought it might, perhaps, be enough to have been born on a Sunday, and to know part of the charm; so one day, when he had sold his charcoal, he did not light the kiln again, but put on his father’s holiday jerkin, his new red stockings and Sunday hat, took his five-foot staff of blackthorn in his hand, and bade his mother farewell.

“I must go to the town,” he said, “for they will soon be drawing the conscription, to see who is to serve his time in the army, and I want to remind the gentlemen in office that thou art a widow, and I thine only son.”

His mother let him go, saying it was a wise step to take. But it was not to the town, but to the “Pine-thicket,” that he took his way. The part of the woods so called lies on the highest slopes of the Black Forest hills, and there is not a single house, or even a hut, for the space of a two hours’ journey all around; for the superstitious people believe that it is not a safe place, and though the pine-trees there stand high and splendid, they are very seldom cut down, for mishaps have often befallen the wood-cutters when they have been working there. Now it has been an axe that has flown from its handle and cut deep into a man’s foot; or again, a tree they were felling has fallen over suddenly, and carried the workmen down with it, wounding, or even killing them. And one could only have used these fine trees for fire-wood, in any case; for the raftsmen would never put a trunk from the “thicket” into their rafts, because of the saying that men and wood came to grief together, if a “thicket-stem” were with them upon the water. So it came about that the trees in the “thicket” stood so high and so close together that even at noontide it was almost as dark as night there; and Peter Munk felt quite eerie as he entered that deep shadow, where he heard no voice, no sound of an axe, and no foot-fall save his own. Even the birds seemed to avoid that thick darkness among the fir-trees.