"Mother, do foresters tell lies?"
Margaret was silent a moment, and then said, "Listen, Fritz! Our Lord makes the wood grow free and the wild game moves from one landowner's property into another's. They can belong to no one. But you do not understand that yet. Now go into the shed and get me some fagots."
Frederick had seen his father lying on the straw, where he was said to have looked blue and fearful; but the boy never spoke of it and seemed indisposed to think of it. On the whole, the recollection of his father had left behind a feeling of tenderness mingled with horror, for nothing so engrosses one as love and devotion on the part of a person who seems hardened against everything else; and in Frederick's case this sentiment grew with the years, through the experience of many slights on the part of others. As a child he was very sensitive about having any one mention his deceased father in a tone not altogether flattering to him—a cause for grief that the none too delicate neighbors did not spare him. There is a tradition in those parts which denies rest in the grave to a person killed by accident. Old Mergel had thus become the ghost of the forest of Brede; as a will o' the wisp he led a drunken man into the pond by a hair; the shepherd boys, when they crouched by their fires at night and the owls screeched in the hollows, sometimes heard quite clearly in broken accents his "Just listen, sweet Lizzie;" and an unprivileged woodman who had fallen asleep under the broad oak and been overtaken by nightfall, had, upon awakening, seen his swollen blue face peeping through the branches. Frederick was obliged to hear much of this from other boys; then he would howl and strike any one who was near; once he even cut some one with his little knife and was, on this occasion, pitilessly thrashed. After that he drove his mother's cows alone to the other end of the valley, where one could often see him lie in the grass for hours in the same position, pulling up the thyme.
He was twelve years old when his mother received a visit from her younger brother who lived in Brede and had not crossed his sister's threshold since her foolish marriage.
Simon Semmler was a short, restless, lean man with bulging fishlike eyes and a face altogether like a pike—an uncanny fellow, in whom exaggerated reserve often alternated with affability no less affected—who would have liked to pass for a shrewd intellect but was considered disagreeable instead. He was a quarrelsome chap, and everybody grew more anxious to avoid him the farther he advanced toward that age when persons of limited intellect are apt to make up in pretensions for what they lose in usefulness. Nevertheless poor Margaret was glad to see him, as she had no other relatives living.
"Simon, is that you?" she asked, trembling so that she had to steady herself on a chair. "You want to see how I am getting along with my dirty boy?"
Simon looked at her earnestly and clasped her hand. "You have grown old,
Margaret."
Margaret sighed. "I've had much sorrow and all kinds of bad luck since I saw you."
"Yes, girl, marry at leisure, repent in haste! Now you are old and the child is small. Everything has its time. But when an old house is burning nothing will quench the fire." A flame, red as blood, flashed across Margaret's care-worn face.
"But I hear your son is cunning and smart," Simon continued.