“She is almost as dangerous as the bullocks!” said the Kammerjunker, and laughed at Eva.
The conversation took another turn.
“Shall we not visit Peter Cripple?” asked Sophie. “The gentlemen can then see the smith’s pretty daughter; she is really too beautiful to be his wife!”
“Is Peter Cripple married?” inquired Otto.
“No, the wedding will be held on Sunday!” replied the Kammerjunker; “but the bride is already in the house. The bans were published last Sunday, and they immediately commenced housekeeping together. This often takes place even earlier, when a man cannot do without a wife. She has taken him on account of his full money-bags!”
“Yes, with the peasant it is seldom love which brings about the affair!” said Louise. “Last year there was quite a young girl who married a man who might have been her grandfather. She took him only, she said, because he had such a good set of earthenware.”
“These were very brittle things to marry upon!” remarked Otto.
Meantime they were nearly come to the edge of the wood. Here stood a little house; hops hung luxuriantly over the hedge, the cat stood with bent back upon the crumbling edge of the well.
Sophie, at the head of the whole company, stepped into the room, where Peter Cripple sat on the table sewing; but, light and active as an elf, he sprang down from the table to kiss her hand. The smith’s pretty daughter was stirring something in an iron pot in the hearth. St. John’s wort, stuck between the beams and the ceiling, shot forth in luxuriant growth, prophesying long life to the inhabitants of the house. On the sooty ceiling glittered herrings’ souls, as a certain portion of the herring’s entrails is called, and which Peter Cripple, following the popular belief, had flung up to the ceiling, convinced that so long as they hung there he should be freed from the ague.
Otto took no part in the conversation, but turned over a quantity of songs which he found; they were stitched together in a piece of blue tobacco-paper. The principal contents were, “New, Melancholy Songs,” “Of the Horrible Murder,” “The Audacious Criminal,” “The Devil in Salmon Lane,” “Boat’s Fall,” and such things; which have now supplanted, among the peasants, the better old popular songs.