“In the meantime,” observed the elder, “we actually know nothing. Pull down your detestable shirt collar from your ears, Peter Joostens, and begin and regularly tell us all; and for your reward you shall have a book as soon as it is printed.”
“Now I have no time for it,” answered the host; “I hear my wife coming down stairs; but come along with us to the village, and on the way I will tell you why the cannon are fired and the music plays.”
The hostess entered the room, and dazzled the travelers’ eyes by her dress, so did it blaze in all the colors of the rainbow. She rushed up to her husband, pulled up his shirt collar again higher than ever, took his arm, and issued out of doors with him. The two travelers accompanied them, and Peter Joostens related on the way to his attentive hearers the whole story of Tall Jan and Blind Rosa; and though he had almost talked himself out of breath, he became besieged with all sorts of questions.
They learned of him, however, that Herr Slaets bought of him the old cuckoo clock, that it might hang in its former place in the inn; that tall Jan had been four-and-thirty years in Russia, and in the fur trade had become a very rich man. That he had bought an estate, and meant to live upon it with Blind Rosa and the besom-maker Nelis’s family, whose children he had already adopted. That he had given the grave-digger a considerable sum of money; and, finally, that this evening there was to be held a grand folks-feast on the estate, for which occasion a whole calf was to be roasted, and two whole copper-fulls of rice furmety to be boiled.
Peter Joostens ceased as they came behind a house upon a great by-road. And now the travelers listened no longer, for they were resolved to be present, and see all the gayety which offered itself to their gaze.
All the houses in the village were adorned with green boughs, bound together with garlands of white and many-colored flowers, and between these, over the heads of the spectators, hung every where festoons, with small lamps and with large red letters. Here and there stood a stately May-pole, with hundreds of little flags glittering with tinsel, and adorned with garlands of bird’s-eggs and pieces of glass. Along the sides of the way the boys and girls had laid wreaths of flowers upon silver-white sand, and bound them together at regular distances, showing the alternating initials J. and R. for Jan and Rosa, the invention of the schoolmaster.
Amongst all this ornament thronged a swarm of spectators from the neighboring villages to witness this extraordinary wedding. The young travelers went from one group to another, and listened to what the people said. But before the procession, which came over the fields, arrived at the village, they hastened to the church, and placed themselves in front of it on a mound, so that they might overlook the whole.
They beheld the procession with a feeling almost bordering on veneration . . . and it really was so beautiful and touching that the heart of the younger one beat with poetic rapture. More than sixty young girls from five to ten years of age, came clad in white, and with childhood’s enchanting smile, like little bright clouds floating through the azure heaven. Upon their free locks, hanging around their fresh countenances, rested garlands of monthly roses, which seemed to contend in beauty with the vermeil lips of the children.
“It is like a saga of Andersen’s,” said the younger of the companions; “the sylphs have quitted the bosoms of the flowers. Innocence and simplicity, youth and joy . . . what an enchanting picture!”
“Ah, ah!” said the other, “there come the peonies! and Zanna Joostens goes first.”