Now only could the information be understood, which Erick and Marianne—­each relieving the other—­gave about the whole occurrence.  Erick told how he, after a strong push, had fallen into the water and then had known nothing more, and had wakened again when somebody was rubbing him firmly.  That had been Marianne, who now related further.  She had gone yesterday afternoon from Oakwood, where she was living now, upward along the Woodbach, to the place where the berries grew the most plentifully, as she knew these many years that she had sought and sold them in the taverns of Upper and Lower Wood.  As she was seeking for berries close by the water, bending down behind the willow bush, she saw how the bush was being shaken and how something had remained hanging to it.  She bent around the bush to find out what it might be, and saw the black velvet jacket on the water!  “Oh, dear God!” she then cried out with unutterable horror, and never stopped crying until, under her desperate rubbing with skirt and apron, Erick opened his eyes and looked with surprise at Marianne.  Now she quickly took the large market-basket in which she intended to put the many small baskets, when they were filled; threw the latter all in a heap, put the dripping Erick in it, and carried him, as quickly as she could, toward her small cottage, far beyond Oakwood, in which she lived together with her cousin.  Here she at once undressed the wet boy, wound him closely in a large blanket so that nothing was to be seen of him besides a tuft of yellow, curly hair, put him in bed with the heavy cover far above his head, for, “getting him warm is the principal thing for the little boy,” she kept on saying to herself.  Then she went into her kitchen and soon came back with a cup of steaming hot milk, lifted Erick’s head from under the covers, so that his mouth became free, and poured the hot milk in it to make the little fellow warm.  When she now had packed him in the blanket again, and the fright at finding the unconscious Erick and the fear of his taking cold had passed a little, then it came into her mind that the people of the parsonage did not know what had become of him, and that they too would be anxious about him.  She went again to the bed and tried to bring the deeply hidden Erick up again.  But Erick was already half asleep, and when Marianne told him her thoughts, he said comfortingly:  “No, no, they will know that I will come back again, and if they are anxious, then ’Lizebeth will come and look for me.”

Of that Marianne was sure:  ’Lizebeth would come and take him home.  No doubt Erick had started to come and see Marianne, his friend in Oakwood, and on his way there had fallen into the Woodbach by accident, Marianne thought, for in her anxiety for his welfare, she had not spoken a word with Erick about the accident.  Now he was fast asleep.

Marianne sat down beside him and lifted the cover now and then to listen whether he was breathing properly.  After she had sat thus a while and noticed how the little fellow’s cheeks began to glow like the reddest strawberries, then she feared no longer that he would catch cold, and she also felt sure that ’Lizebeth would not come and thought that the people in the parsonage would assume that he was going to spend the night at the cottage.  So Marianne had peacefully locked her cottage and gone to sleep.