Where the wood halts and only brush can grow, a tiny hut clung to the rocks. It was a miserably poor little nest with a low hanging roof of moss, on top of which house-leek and other growing plants caught foothold, even one saucy little pine tree had settled down there. The door was low, the window covered with paper, but a contented white goat munched the grass in front of the door, and a few weather-beaten sunflowers nodded their heavy heads in fat condescension.
In this lonely hut, the poorest for many a mile, lived the honest widow Anna Maria Balduin. She had lived there many years, ever since the time, eighteen years back, when she had entered it as the happy bride of Peter Balduin, the sturdy woodchopper. Five years later they had carried him out and buried him in the little hill churchyard down in Kyllburg. That had been a bad year. The potato crop was a failure, bread rose in price, the famine fever ravished the Eifel, the snow fell early, and hungry wolves crept down to the outlying huts. In the widow’s little home the care for daily bread, grief for the lost one, cold, and deprivation were daily guests. The pale woman sat at her spinning wheel and let the tears flow free, while her little daughter Margret knelt beside her, laughing and playing with pebbles, unheeding her mother’s sorrow.
Years had passed since then; the fresh grave had fallen in and grass had grown over it, as over the wounds of the heart. The little hut had grown more dilapidated, and little Margret had become a tall girl. She sat by the door spinning for her daily bread in the service of the rich peasants’ wives, and had the goat tied to her foot by a string, so that she could care for it without stopping her work. Margret spun and spun, looking up occasionally, aimlessly, or in unconscious longing, at the sky above her, which domed pale blue and unapproachably cool over the bare, rocky hilltops.
Clara Viebig
Her mother was very ill. For weeks and months she had lain bent and stiff, drawn with rheumatic pains, in the worm-eaten bed on her coarse pillows, too helpless sometimes even to raise her hand to her mouth. “It looks bad,” the wise woman from Kyllburg had said, when after much entreaty and a payment of fifty pfennigs (twelve and a half cents) down she had been persuaded to climb up to the miserable hut. She took away with her the widow’s one hen, and left a magic medicine in its place. But the medicine did no magic, the sick woman groaned and moaned more than ever, and the screech owl, the bird of death, screamed each midnight outside the window.
This was a particularly bad day. Pretty Margret sat by the bedside with drooping head. Her busy fingers continued to spin, but her usually laughing brown eyes were filled with tears. She was a good child, who had nothing in all the world but her mother and her seventeen years. But her fresh youth was blighted by the sorrow for her mother as the flowers in May are smitten by hail.
It was a little brightening of the sadness when a knock came on the door and a fat peasant woman pushed herself over the threshold with sighs and pantings.
“Praise be Jesus Christ.”
“Forever and ever, amen.”