Under very simple and often inadequate laws the inhabitants’ ideas of right and wrong had, in some measure, become confused, or, rather, a second law had grown up beside the official, a law of public opinion, of custom, and of long uncontested privilege.  The property holders, who sat as judges in the lower courts, meted out punishments or rewards in accordance with their own notions, which were, in most cases, honest.  The common people did what seemed to them practicable and compatible with a somewhat lax conscience, and it was only the loser to whom it sometimes occurred to look up dusty old documents.  It is hard to view that period without prejudice; since it has passed away it has been either haughtily criticised or foolishly praised; for those who lived through it are blinded by too many precious recollections, and the newer generation does not understand it.  This much, however, one may assert, that the shell was weaker, the kernel stronger, crime more frequent, want of principle rarer.  For he who acts according to his convictions, be they ever so faulty, can never be entirely debased; whereas nothing kills the soul more surely than appealing to the written law when it is at variance with one’s own sense of what is right.

The inhabitants of the little country of which we speak, being more restless and enterprising than their neighbors, certain features of life came out more sharply here than would have been the case elsewhere under like conditions.  Wood stealing and poaching were every-day occurrences, and in the numerous fights which ensued each one had to seek his own consolation if his head was bruised.  Since great and productive forests constituted the chief wealth of the country, these forests were of course vigilantly watched over, less, however, by legal means than by continually renewed efforts to defeat violence and trickery with like weapons.

The village of B. was reputed to be the most arrogant, most cunning, and most daring community in the entire principality.  Perhaps its situation in the midst of the deep and proud solitude of the forest had early strengthened the innate obstinacy of its inhabitants.  The proximity of a river which flowed into the sea and bore covered vessels large enough to transport shipbuilding timber conveniently and safely to foreign ports, helped much in encouraging the natural boldness of the wood-thieves; and the fact that the entire neighborhood swarmed with foresters served only to aggravate matters, since in the oft-recurring skirmishes the peasants usually had the advantage.  Thirty or forty wagons would start off together on beautiful moonlight nights with about twice as many men of every age, from the half-grown boy to the seventy-year-old village magistrate, who, as an experienced bell-wether, led the procession as proudly and self-consciously as when he took his seat in the court-room.  Those who were left behind listened unconcernedly to the grinding and pounding of the wheels dying away in the