Ezekiel looked at him in horror. “What do you say? Are you trying to make game of me? Do you mean to say that I have no heart?”
“Oh! yes, you have a heart right enough,” said Peter, “but it is made of stone.”
Ezekiel stared at him in astonishment, looked round to see that no one was listening, and then said: “How do you know that? Has your own ceased to beat also?”
“It beats no longer, at least not in my breast,” answered Peter Munk. “But tell me, now you understand how it is with me, what will happen to our hearts?”
“Why worry about that, my friend,” laughed Ezekiel. “You are alive at present and that is the best of having a heart of stone, one is never afraid of such thoughts.”
“Quite true, but one thinks about them all the same,” said Peter, “and I can remember still how they would have frightened me once upon a time.”
“Of course, we can’t expect things to go very well with us,” said Ezekiel. “Once upon a time I asked a schoolmaster about it and he told me that our hearts would be weighed; the light ones went up on the scale and those heavy with sin went down, so I expect our stone hearts will be pretty heavy.”
“Sometimes I am a little uncomfortable to think that my heart should be so indifferent to such things,” said Peter.
So they talked together. That night Peter heard the voice whispering five or six times in his ear: “Peter, Peter, see that you get a warmer heart!” He felt no remorse for what he had done, but when he told his servants that his wife had gone on a journey he wondered to himself whither she had journeyed.
Six whole days and nights passed and ever it seemed to him there was a voice whispering in his ear, and he could think of nothing but the little Glass-man and his warning. And so, on the seventh day, he sprang out of bed and said: “Well, I will see if I cannot get a warm heart again, instead of this unfeeling stone in my bosom, for it makes my life both tedious and lonely.” So he dressed himself in his best and rode off to the clump of black pines. When he reached the outskirts he dismounted, tied up his horse, and hurried to the summit of the hill, and as he came to the big pine-tree he repeated his verse: