THE HOSIER
"The greatest sorrow of all down here,
Is to lose the one we hold most dear."
Sometimes, when I have wandered far out on the wide heath, where I have had nothing but the brown heather around me and the blue sky above me; when I walked far away from mankind and the monuments of its busy doings here below,--which after all are only molehills to be leveled by time or by some restless Tamerlane;--when I drifted, light-hearted, free, and proud, like the Bedouin, whom no house, no narrowly bounded field chains to the spot, but who owns, possesses, all he sees,--who does not dwell, but who goes wherever he pleases; when my far-hovering eye caught a glimpse of a house in the horizon, and was thus disagreeably arrested in its airy flight, sometimes there came (God forgive me this passing thought, it was no more than that) the wish--would that this dwelling of man were not! there too is trouble and sorrow; there too they quarrel and fight about mine and thine!--Oh! the happy desert is mine, is thine, is everybody's, is nobody's.--It is said that a forester has proposed to disturb the settlements, to plant forests on the fields of the peasants and in place of their torn-down villages; the far more inhuman thought has taken possession of me at times--what if the heather-grown heath were still here the same as it was centuries ago, undisturbed, untouched by the hand of man! But as I have said, I did not mean it seriously. For when tired and weary, suffering from hunger and thirst, I thought longingly of the Arab's tent and coffee-pot, I thanked God that a heather-thatched roof--be it even miles away--promised me shelter and refreshment.
On a still, warm September day, several years ago, I found myself walking on this same heath, which, Arabically speaking, I call mine. No wind stirred the blushing heather; the air was heavy and misty with heat. The far-off hills that limited the horizon seemed to hover like clouds around the immense plain, and took many wonderful shapes: houses, towers, castles, men and animals; but all of dark uncertain outline, changing like dream pictures; now a cottage grew into a church, and that in turn into a pyramid; here a spire arose, there another sank; a man became a horse, and this in turn an elephant; here floated a boat, there a ship with all sails set.
My eye found its pleasure for quite a while in watching these fantastic figures--a panorama which only the sailor and the desert-dweller have occasion to enjoy--when finally I began to look for a real house among the many false ones; I wanted right ardently to exchange all my beautiful fairy palaces for a single human cottage.
Success was mine; I soon discovered a real farm without spires and towers, whose outlines became distincter and sharper the nearer I came to it, and which, flanked by peat-stacks, looked much larger than it really was. Its inmates were unknown to me. Their clothes were poor, their furniture simple, but I knew that the heath-dweller often hides noble rental in an unpainted box or in a miserable wardrobe, and a fat pocketbook inside a patched coat; when therefore my eyes fell on an alcove packed full of stockings, I concluded, and quite rightly, that I was in the house of a rich hosier. (In parenthesis it may be said that I do not know any poor ones.)
A middle-aged, gray-haired, but still strong man rose from his slice and offered me his hand with these words: "Welcome!--with permission to ask, where does the good friend come from?"
Do not jeer at so ill-mannered and straightforward a question! the heath peasant is quite as hospitable as the Scotch laird, and but a little more curious; after all, he cannot be blamed for wanting to know who his guest is.
When I had told him who I was and whence I came, he called his wife, who immediately put all the delicacies of the house before me and begged me insistently, with good-hearted kindness, to eat and drink, although my hunger and thirst made all insistence unnecessary.