Debit and Credit / Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag

by Gustav Freytag

Our Anton had now to find out what he possessed and what he wanted.

The following morning they proceeded to view the entire property. It consisted of the mansion-house, with the lands and buildings adjacent, and of three farms. About half the land was arable, a small part laid down in meadow; about half was wood, bordered with barren sand. The castle and the village lay about the middle of the great clearing; two of the farms were at opposite points of the compass, east and west, and both were hid by projections of the forest. The third farm lay toward the south, and was entirely divided by a wood from the rest of the estate. It joined on to another Polish village, had its own farm-buildings, and had always been separately cultivated. It occupied about a quarter of the plain, had a distillery on it, and had been rented for many years by a brandy-merchant, well to do. His lease had been extended by Ehrenthal, but the sum he paid was low. However, his occupancy was at present a good thing for the property, as it insured some return for one portion of it, at least. The devastated wood was under the care of a forester.

The first walk through the portion adjacent to the castle was as little cheering as possible: the fields were, generally speaking, not prepared for winter-sowing; and wherever the marks of the plow appeared, the land had been taken possession of by the villagers, who regarded the neglected property as their perquisite, and looked morosely at the foreign settlers.

For years they had done none of the work that their feudal tenure required of them, and the village bailiff plainly told Anton that the community would resent any return to old customs. He pretended he did not understand a word of German, and even Karl's eloquence failed to conciliate him. The soil itself, neglected and weedy as it was, turned out generally better than Anton had expected, and the landlord boasted of his crops; but in the vicinity of the wood it was very poor, and in many places quite unfit for culture.

"This is a serious sort of day," said Anton, putting up his pocket-book. "Harness the britzska; we will drive to see the cattle."

The farm where the cattle were quartered lay to the west, about a mile and a half from the castle. A miserable stable and the cottage of a farm-servant was all they found there. The cows and a pair of draught oxen were under his charge, and he lived there with his wife and a half-witted herdsman. None of these people understood much German, or inspired any confidence: the wife was a dirty woman, without shoes and stockings, whose milk-pails looked as if long unwashed. The farm-servant, and sometimes the herdsman, plowed with the yoke of oxen wherever they chose; the cattle fed on the meadow land.

"Here is work for you," said Anton; "examine the cattle, and see what you can find of winter provender. I will make an inventory of the building and implements."

Karl soon came to report. "Four-and-twenty milch cows, twelve heifers, and an old bull; about a dozen cows, at most, are in profit, the rest mere grass-devourers: the whole of them are a poor set. Some foreign cows, probably Swiss ones, have been brought over and crossed with a much larger breed, and the result is ugly enough. The best cows have evidently been exchanged; for some wretched creatures are running about, the rest keeping aloof from them: they can't have been here long. As to fodder, there is hay enough for winter, and a few bundles of oat straw; no wheat straw at all."

"The buildings are out of order too," cried Anton, in return. "Drive now to the distillery. I have carefully examined the conditions of the lease, and am better up in it than in most things."

The carriage rolled over a shaky bridge that spanned the brook, then through fields and an expanse of sand scantily covered with arenaceous plants, in whose roots a pine-seed had nestled here and there, stretching dwarf branches over the waste; then came the woods, with many a gap, where lay nothing but yellow sand, and on all sides stumps overgrown with heath and brambles. Slowly the horses waded on. Neither of the strangers spoke, as both were engaged in observing every tree that a fortunate chance had allowed to grow and spread better than the rest.