After our meal we began to tell stories, but our grandmother positively forbade our mentioning the name of any of the forest sprites, or of any evil or questionable creature whatever.
In the night I could not sleep. All was so strange and grand around us, and it did seem to me that there were wailings and sighings and distant moanings among the pines, not quite to be accounted for by the wind. I grew rather uneasy, and at length lifted my head to see if any one else was awake.
Opposite me sat Eva, her face lifted to the stars, her hands clasped, and her lips moving as if in prayer. I felt her like a guardian angel, and instinctively drew nearer to her.
"Eva," I whispered at last, "do you not think there are rather strange and unaccountable noises around us? I wonder if it can be true that strange creatures haunt the forests?"
"I think there are always spirits around us, Cousin Elsè," she replied, "good and evil spirits prowling around us, or ministering to us. I suppose in the solitude we feel them nearer, and perhaps they are."
I was not at all reassured.
"Eva," I said, "I wish you would say some prayers; I feel afraid I may not think of the right ones. But are you really not at all afraid?"
"Why should I be?" she said softly; "God is nearer us always than all the spirits, good or evil,—nearer and greater than all. And he is the Supreme Goodness. I like the solitude, Cousin Elsè, because it seems to lift me above all the creatures to the One who is all and in all. And I like the wild forests," she continued, as if to herself, "because God is the only owner there, and I can feel more unreservedly, that we, and the creatures, and all we most call our own, are His, and only His. In the cities, the houses are called after the names of men, and each street and house is divided into little plots, of each of which some one says, 'It is mine.' But here all is visibly only God's, undivided, common to all. There is but one table, and that is His; the creatures live as free pensioners on His bounty."
"Is it then sin to call anything our own?" I asked.
"My book says it was this selfishness that was the cause of Adam's fall," she replied. "Some say it was because Adam ate the apple that he was lost, or fell; but my book says it was 'because of his claiming something for his own; and because of his saying, I, mine, me, and the like.'"