Sitting close together, trembling with curiosity and a strange delightful excitement, the two boys made their entry into a new wonder-world where huge evil monsters met their death beneath the mighty strokes of brave knights, where all was glorious and lovely and wonderful, and nothing resembled the dull monotony of daily life. There were no drunken, stupid, dwarfed little men, and instead of half-rotten wooden barracks, were gold-gleaming palaces and impregnable mountains of iron soaring to heaven, and while in thought they wandered through this wondrous fantasy realm of romance, at their backs the mad cobbler played his harmonica and sang his rhyming couplets:
"I'll serve the devil only
While my life is whole,
So when I am done for,
He cannot catch my soul."
"That's the way, my brothers," he went on, "keep it up every day. God loves the happy men."
The harmonica began to whimper again as though it taxed it to overtake the hurrying voice of the cobbler, then he sang a jolly dance tune, his voice as it were running a race with the accompaniment:
"Never mind if in your youth
Your lot be cold and rough,
Once you make your way to Hell,
You'll find it hot enough."
Every verse gained laughter and applause from the audience. The sounds of the harmonica mingled with the clatter of glasses, the heavy tread of the drinkers, and the noise of the benches dragged here and there, and the whole blended into a wild tumult, not unlike the howling of the winter storm through the forest.
But in the little cabin, shut off from this chaos of noise only by a thin partition of wood, the two boys sat bent over the book, and one read aloud softly,
"The knight caught the monster in his iron embrace, and it bellowed like thunder with wrath and pain."