An indiscreet speech, which offended my teachers, made an end to all my dreams.  I was ploughed, and I resolved at once to leave the town, and to seek my fortune in the world.  I first enlisted with Andreas Hofer to fight the French invaders, and was carried off a prisoner into France.  Then only I learnt that the Tyrolese were rebels against their own emperor, that I had fought for a bad cause; and to atone for it I took service with the great Napoleon’s army.  I was among those who escaped from the Russian disaster, and, in my enthusiasm for Napoleon, whom I regarded as the liberator of the peoples, fought for him against my own country.  At Leipzig I shot Henry, my best friend, whom I only recognised when in his agony he called me by my name.  Then only my eyes were opened.  Failure had dogged my every step.  A hermit’s life in the wilderness was all that was left for me.  This resolve I communicated to the Baron von Schrankenheim, who, after vain attempts to dissuade me from my purpose, spoke to me of this wilderness, his property, where I could do real good among the rough wood-cutters, poachers, shepherds and charcoal-burners, who, cut off from the rest of the world, eked out their existence without priest or doctor or schoolmaster.  Winkelsteg was to be my hermitage; and now I am here, a schoolmaster without a school.  I shall have to study these rough folk and gain their confidence before I can set to work.

The Forest Folk

Strange trades are carried on in this wilderness.  These people literally dig their bread out of earth and stone and ant-heaps, scrape it off the trees, distill it out of uneatable fruit.  There is the root-digger, whose booty of mountain ovens is said to go to far Turkey to be turned into scent.  He would long have given up digging, to live entirely on poaching, but for his hope to unearth some day treasure of gold and jewels.  One of these “forest-devils” has just died.  He never worked at all.  His profession was eating.  He went from village to village and from fair to fair, eating cloth and leather, nails, glass, stones, to the amazement of his audience.  He died from eating a poisonous root given him by some unknown digger—­they say it was the devil himself.  His funeral oration was delivered by a pale, bent, quiet man, known as the Solitary, of whose life nobody can give one any information.

Then there is the pitch-boiler.  You can smell him from afar, and see him glitter through the thicket.  His pitch-oil is bought by the wood-cutter for his wounds, by the charcoal-burner for his burns, by the carter for his horse, by the brandy-distiller for his casks.  It is a remedy for all ailments.  The most dangerous of all the forest-devils is the brandy-distiller.  He is better dressed than the others, has a kind word for everybody, and plays the tempter with but too great success.