Merciless creditors threatened with seizure; entire ruin stared him in the face; he saw himself already in fancy with wife and children abandoned to bitter want.
He took a walk into the country in order to seek relief for his oppressed heart for a few short hours.
Soon he was alone with his sorrow in the wood solitude.
He climbed the Göldner, till he had reached the summit of the Spatenberg, where the green-grass carpet and the shade of the old beeches invited him to a short repose.
He might have perhaps given expression to his trouble in loud lamentations.
However that may be, he at last prepared to go further, when suddenly he observed a lovely maiden, who, clad in mourning garments and weeping, sat on a moss-grown stone at the entrance to the Jungfernloch, or Maiden's Cave.
His sympathy at this sight was awakened in proportion to his own melancholy. He could not restrain himself from approaching the graceful figure, and inquiring the cause of her grief.
She, however, was of opinion that her sorrow was much too great to permit of her troubling any one else with it, and declared she could only find a mitigation of her woe in drying up the tears of others.
She told him she had, unseen, perceived what troubled him, and it afforded her soul sweet comfort to know that she could help him.
After she had made this statement to the astonished man, she bade him follow her into the cave.